Among the focuses of the Proms this summer are the centennials of Elliott Carter and Olivier Messiaen and the eightieth birthday of Karlheinz Stockhausen (due to his death in 2007, the celebration of his birthday was fused with a commemoration of his life’s work). Although the first night concert included the first performance of a Proms commission from Carter, the piano piece Caténaires, he is only represented by three other works, the Oboe Concerto, Night Fantasies, and Soundings, as opposed to eighteen works of Messiaen, several of them, including the opera St. Francis of Assisi, to be played on September

Dear Friends,   You are cordially invited to a concert of The Locrian Chamber Players this Saturday, August 23 at 8PM in the 10th Floor Performance Space of Riverside Church, 490 Riverside Drive, New York. The Program:   Charles Wuorinen: Duo Sonata (NY Premiere)   Charles Wuorinen: Josquiniana   Louis Andriessen: Miserere (U.S. Premiere)   Sebastian Currier: Night Time   Hayes Biggs: Sultry Air, Balmy Breezes (World Premiere)   The Players: Calvin Wiersma and Curtis Macomber, violin; Dan Z. Panner, viola; Greg Hesselink, cello; Erin Lesser, flute; Anna Reinersman, harp; Blair McMillen, piano.   A reception will follow the concert.  

The BBC marked the beginning day of the Beijing Olympics by offering the first performance of Olympic Fire, commissioned for the occasion from Chen Yi. All of Chen’s music uses Western modernist practices to evoke her native culture, but Olympic Fire deals even more directly in Chinese materials, using folksongs both from the predominant Han Chinese and from minority Chinese ethnic groups as well (Chen keeps to the Chinese government party line by considering Tibetans among those Chinese ethnic minorities), and imitating the sounds of Chinese instruments, particularly the lusheng (described by Chen as a “mouth pipe-organ”).  Olympic Fire begins

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

Back in June, I wrote about how the Metropolitan Opera snatched victory from the jaws of defeat in the marketing of Satyagraha–how when classical music organizations employ the right kind of marketing (or any marketing at all) they see much better ticket sales than they are accustomed to. This year the Nashville Symphony is further reinforcing that point with their new marketing strategy for their season, which seeks especially to improve single ticket sales to younger audience members and other audiences they haven’t been effectively reaching in the past.

On the shelf next to the photograph of Tibetan lama Galen Rinpoche, next to the framed Dalai Lama picture, next to the family photographs and statuettes of violins and goddesses, is a bevy of ceramic frog figurines, suspending a jet-black shirt with purple lettering. It reads: Well, while I’m here I’ll do the work- and what’s the work? to ease the pain of living. Everything else, drunken dumbshow. (from “Memory Gardens” –Allen Ginsberg) The makeshift shrine appears twice in Scott Hicks’s 119 minute-long documentary, “Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts,” and gives as apt a snapshot of Philip

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?. “