Gordon Wright, a conductor who championed obscure composers and made music across the chilly climes of Alaska as founder of the Arctic Chamber Orchestra, was found dead on Wednesday on the porch of his cabin in Indian, Alaska. He was 72. [more] In the autumn of her life, decades after she had last performed in public, the British pianist Joyce Hatto was rediscovered by a small group of musicians and critics who contended that her recordings of Chopin, Rachmaninoff, Liszt and others ranked alongside those of the 20th century’s most exceptional virtuosos…But now Ms. Hatto’s reputation for excellence and originality

Last night’s Never-on-Monday Evening Concert at LACMA presented the Argento Chamber Ensemble in its sampling of German music.  Lanier Sammons wrote a nice review of the concert’s performance in New York.  As performed here, the program had a different sequence, separating the two pre-Expressionist works so that the Schoenberg Kammersymphonie ended the first half and the Wagner transcription ended the second.  Despite Lanier’s good review (and that from the NY Times), I felt the concert made a strong argument that an ensemble of five strings and ten winds does not make for good balance and clean textures.  Listening to the Liebestod made

On Sunday, Argentinean composer Osvaldo Golijov won two 2007 Grammy awards—Best Opera Recording and Best Contemporary Classical Composition—for his opera, Ainadamar (Fountain Of Tears) starring soprano Dawn Upshaw and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra with conductor Robert Spano. In August of last year, WGBH  Classics in the Morning host Cathy Fuller sat down with Golijov at his home in Brookline, MA and discussed this award winning opera, his first. This exclusive, in-depth interview—complete with excerpts from the moving opera—can be heard online at wgbh.org/osvaldo. Ainadamer tells the story of dramatist Federico García Lorca and his muse, Catalan stage actress Margarita Xirgu (in

We’re having an ice storm in the Center of the Universe this morning.  Good day to be old and vested although it’s not really the thrill you think it’s going to be.  Especially the old part. The last time Master Salvage and I took a meeting in the S21 Starbucks HQ the subject of guilty pleasures came up.  You know what I mean, Steve and Eydie, Karen Carpenter, Alvin and the Chipmunks.  But, applied to non-pop music.  David confessed that there were parts of certain Michael Nyman pieces that sound pretty darn good.  I owned up to an affection for Hovhaness.  Now, it’s your turn. 

The Tablet PC-wielding piano-playing super-awesome Hugh Sung is celebrating one year as a blogger. He has a podcast here introducing his cool gear to musicians. Get with the program, folks, and give Hugh a click. Busy here chasing pentatonic collections in Debussy.  I think there goes one right now…   

Times have been good for my old composition teacher Lee Hyla. After many years on the composition faculty at Boston’s New England Conservatory, he has been hired into an endowed chair at Northwestern University, where he will take up residence in the coming academic year. His impending departure has precipitated a flurry of activity in Boston, including a lengthy and glowing profile in the Boston Globe in mid January and a farewell retrospective concert at New England Conservatory a few days ago. And in November, John Zorn’s Tzadik label released his latest CD “Wilson’s Ivory-bill.” Samples of three of the

Found on the Web: ” … I think the thing about classical music being a class-signifier is more to do with the fact that our society has lost the notion that there are great works of culture that people should … might be excited to discover and there’s a common pool of artistic excitement that in a democracy you should offer to everyone. “That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t broaden the repertoire, but essentially if you live in a western democracy you have a certain historical — well, things have got to where they are now because of the culture, and

Composer Ann Millikan sent us a note yesterday.  Please let it be known: The great Quapaw-Cherokee composer Louis Ballard passed just around midnight at his home in Santa Fe, NM.  He was 75.  He was a dear man, and will be missed.