The Cleveland Plain-Dealer’s music critic Donald Rosenberg has been taken off the Cleveland Symphony beat–apparently for saying what many people (myself included) actually believe:   Franz Welser-Möst  is pretty much an unimaginative  hack in charge of a great orchestra.  Today’s Times.

UPDATE:  Tim Mangan has more.

1938 was the beginning of a very rough patch for Europe but–as it turns out–it was a great year for the future of American music. Several of America’s most influential living composers were born in the early dawn of World War II, including John Corigliano, Joan Tower, Frederic Rzewski, Charles Wuorinen, William Bolcom, and John Harbison. The serendipity of that bountiful year has not gone unnoticed as a couple of new recordings and numerous 70th birthday bashes will attest.

The most satisfying of these celebrations of the Class of ’38 to cross our path is pianist Blair McMillen’s revelatory Centaur release multiplicities: ’38: Music by Composers born in 1938. Multiplicities is exactly the right word in this case, because the composers represented here may have been born in the same year but, stylistically, they come from different planets. The cool and polite elegance of Corigliano and the cosmopolitan eclecticism of Bolson are as far removed from the populist Americana of Tower and Rzewski as they are from the gnarly serialism of Wuorinen.

And, of course, there is John Harbison, the pick of the 1938 litter IMHO (as the kids like to say), who has spectacularly succeeded at his own stated aesthetic intent: “…to make each piece different from the others, to find clear, fresh large designs, to reinvent tradition.”

Blair McMillen is one of three or four great young pianists who specialize in new music and if you throw in the caveat “has an uncanny feeling for the composer’s intent,” he may well stand alone. The quality of his playing on multiplicities: ’38 is consistently extraordinary but just as remarkable is the way he perfectly captures the individual “voice” of each of these highly diverse composers. We are accustomed to hearing most of them in larger settings but here, stripped down to a single piano (or in the case Corigliano’s Chiraoscuro two pianos tuned ¼ tone apart), the dazzling range of the Class of ‘38’s compositional talents becomes manifest. For his uncanny ability to contrast and compare music of enormous diversity, we owe McMillen a debt.

And don’t forget Monday night at Merkin Hall when the Da Capo Chamber Players, for whom McMillen is pianist, presents a 70^th birthday portrait of Joan Tower. Tower was an original founder of Da Capo and its pianist for 15 years. 

John Adams – On the Transmigration of Souls 
Michael Gordon – The Sad Park 
Dennis Báthory-Kitsz: The Key of Locust
Phil Kline – Vigil
Elodie Lauten: S.O.S.W.T.C

Sonny Rollins, aka the Saxophone Colossus, turns 78 today. Check out the multimedia celebration at his web site.  This year’s focus is on his fans, his web visitors, his greatest inspiration, Coleman Hawkins, and an extraordinary new recording.

Sonny doesn’t seem to be slowing down.  The year began with his 50th Anniversary Carnegie Hall concert. He’s been around the world, all over the US, Europe, and Asia (Japan, Korea, Singapore, Australia). Next month, two new releases celebrate his remarkable creativity, Sonny Rollins in Vienne, his first DVD, and a compilation of live performances, Road Shows, Volume 1.

Watching the gritty HBO series called Generation Kill about a platoon of young Marines at the beginning of the invasion of Iraq, it struck me again how ambivalent music’s relationship to warfare really is.  Sure, one end of the music-as-weapon spectrum runs through the high-brow pacifism of Britten and Michael Tippet and the I ain’t a’marchin’ anymore populism of Phil Ochs.  All we are saying is give peace a chance.

But on the other end lives the beat of tribal drums and primitive rhythms; the ritualistic mix of noise and fire and spirits that sends warriors off on a blood-letting frenzy.  There’s also martial music, which is a form of canned nationalism meant to build pride and a sense of exceptionalism. In Generation Kill, the young Marines head out in their Humvees singing–in appropriate falsetto–Minnie Riperton’s “Lovin’ You.”  A children’s chorus of young men determined to free the world of the Haj and fags and liberals and to prove to themselves and their platoon mates that they are not afraid of death.

The talented young composer David T. Little must have had something like this ambivalance in mind when he wrote Soldier Songs,  an evening-length multimedia performance piece, that will be staged Saturday at 7 pm and Sunday night at 6 pm at  Le Poisson Rouge, 158 Bleecker Street.   Comprised of 11 songs with an original Libretto by the composer, the work combines elements of theater, opera, concert music, rock and animation to explore the dichotomy between war and modern society through the abstract character, the Soldier.

Soldier Songs was first presented in 2006 as a song cycle by the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble and had its orchestral premiere as part of New York City Opera’s VOX Festival in 2008.  The current Beth Morrison Projects production is the first fully staged presentation of this dramatic work and features a splendid creative team: singer David Adam Moore, members of the ensemble Newspeak, conductor Todd Reynolds, director Yuval Sharon, set/costume designer Chisato Uno, lighting designer Lucas Krech, and animator/video designer Corey Michael Smithson.

It’s been three years since the human and moral disaster that was Hurricane Katrina overran New Orleans and uncovered an ugly blight on America’s soul.   To help make sure that nobody forgets, New Amsterdam Records will release a digital version of Ted Hearne’s powerful work Katrina Ballads on August 29.

“It is my hope that setting primary-source texts from the devastating week in 2005 when Katrina hit will help us keep this time active in our memory, challenging us to cut through the spin that followed, and bringing us closer to an understanding of the true aftermath,” Hearne says.  “New Orleans has long been a musical epicenter and a real crossroads of culture. The musical influences present in Katrina Ballads are plentiful and diverse. In that sense, this work is a tribute to the life of music, and its ability to shape and inspire us.”

The piece has 11 instrumentalists and 5 singers and it’s an homage to New Orleans rooted deeply in American music, as is evident in the variety of musical styles of the singers featured in the recording. Some of the instrumental performers are staples in the NYC classical music scene while others are from Charleston, South Carolina and are predominantly jazz players. The singers are a mix of contemporary classical, gospel, R&B, and musical theater performers. You will hear influences of gospel, jazz and spirituals into the sound of the music, along with an operatic feel at times.

Thanks to Ted Hearne, here are a couple of  songs from Katrina Ballads:

anderson-cooper-and-mary-landrieu

brownie-youre-doing-a-heck-of-a-job

Here’s a big loss to the New York new music community.  George Steel, who has made Miller Theatre at Columbia University an essential venue since taking over as executive director in 1997, is leaving Miller to become General Director of The Dallas Opera, effective October 1.   It’s a great career move, of course, but New York is going to miss his adventuresome programming which has made Miller a reliably memorable concert-going experience,  and attracted large and notably young audiences.

Steel, a 41-year-old Maryland native and graduate of Yale University, is founder and conductor of the Gotham City Orchestra and Vox Vocal Ensemble and has programmed and/or conducted music that spans more than 600 years, ranging from Tallis and Byrd, to Lotti and Bach, to Brahms and Chausson, to Stravinsky and Ives, to John Zorn and Morton Feldman.

In this age of Dobbsian-fueled immigration hysteria, what could be more timely than an opera about a beautiful Mexican drug smuggler who kills her lover after he betrays her and, in the process, becomes a folk heroine.

¡Unicamente la Verdad! ,  a “videoopera” with music by Gabriela Ortiz and libretto by Rubén Ortiz-Torres, is the story of the contemporary feminist heroine Camelia “la Tejana,” who has come to symbolize the idea of the strong woman in Mexican folklore and the subject of numerous   “corridos” — a form of Mexican ballad — popularized by Los Tigres del Norte?.

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