Sometimes, classical music gets a bad rap. To be perfectly honest, there is a chunk of the population that finds it to be synonymous with any number of derogatory terms: boring, annoying, or pompous. Some classical music lovers and advocates will counter this popular belief with arguments that only go to further the opinion of the other side: “Some people want to listen to mindless music”, “Some people simply don’t have patience”, etc. These ridiculous arguments only go to further the stereotype that classical music lovers are all pompous windbags who believe themselves to be uniquely educated and informed.
How, then, do we get people to forget their misconception, and believe that EVERYONE can enjoy or even love classical music, regardless of education, socioeconomic standing, or profession?
It all comes down to how classical music is presented; and now, for a limited time, you could join one organization that does it right.
This venue was the location of this past Sunday’s concert featuring Iktus Percussion (Cory Bracken, Chris Graham, Nicholas Woodbury, and Steve Sehman), pianist Taka Kigawa, and toy pianist Phyllis Chen. According to Iktus member Cory Bracken, one of the missions of the evening (focused entirely around composer John Cage) was to take some of his pieces that are almost exclusively performed in academic settings, and begin to inject them into the public concert repertoire. What the audience encountered, therefore, was a healthy mix of both often and not-so-often performed pieces by John Cage.
On Tuesday, the New York Philharmonic celebrates French composer Henri Dutilleux, the recipient of the orchestra’s first Marie-Josée Kravis Prize for New Music.
Dutilleux has decided to use the prize money to commission three composers to write works for the Philharmonic in his honor. He’s already selected one – Peter Eotvos. Who would you recommend to Mr. Dutilleux as the other two commission recipients?
Alan Gilbert will conduct and Yo-Yo Ma is the featured guest soloist.
Program
Métaboles (1964)
Ainsi La Nuit for String Quartet (1976)
Cello Concerto — Tout un monde lointain (A whole distant world) (1970)
We’re pleased to introduce cellist Maya Beiser’s performing the Michael Harrison composition “Just Ancient Loops,” with film by Bill Morrison, which will receive its premiere at the Bang on a Can 25th Anniversary Marathon this coming Sunday in NYC.
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/43002580[/vimeo]
This is just one of many performances that will occur over the marathon’s 12 hours of free live music-making: check out the complete schedule online here.
Congrats to the can bangers – may you have many more seasons of marathoning!
103 year old Elliott Carter has written a new work, Two Controversies and a Conversation, which will be premiered tonight at the Met Museum as part of the New York Philharmonic’sContact! series. The concert, conducted by David Robertson, also includes a newly commissioned work by Michael Jarrell and Pierre Boulez’s …explosante-fixe…
Carter discusses the piece in the video below.
The Contact! program will be repeated on Saturday at Symphony Space.
This month, Gyan Riley is curating for New York venue the Stone. One of the San Francisco residents that he’s invited to visit the Big Apple for a gig is avant-cabaret artist Amy X. Neuburg, who performs there tonight (details below).
Neuburg eschews the usual instrumentation of a cabaret performer, instead using an electronic drumset. But the music isn’t isolated to percussive utterances; rather the synth drums serve as a control surface with which she can trigger live recording and overdubs. Thus, a drum hit might ‘sound’ like drums, or it might just as easily trigger backing vocals or synth patches.
Using this setup, Neuburg often creates multiple loops, each with its own place in the sound field. Her set at the Stone (her first appearance there) will introduce some new works, but also revisits her back catalog, updating several pieces to accommodate this “spatialized” aesthetic.
To many, Memorial Day weekend means the kickoff of the summer season: getaways, barbecues, traffic, and more traffic …
But the New York new music scene doesn’t seem to be on holiday from its Spring season yet. indeed, we’ll be talking a number of events in coming weeks, extending well into June.
Performers and, one hopes, audiences, aren’t even taking the weekend off. Tonight is an all Milton Babbitt concert at CUNY Grad Center. It features several pieces done by the performers who’ve made them part of their core repertoires. But any chance to hear Judith Bettina sing Philomel again or William Anderson and Oren Fader play Soli e Duettini is most welcome. Less often heard but featured here is the early “Composition for Four Instruments” and the piano duo Envoi from 1990. Though it’s bittersweet to go to hear Babbitt’s music without his convivial presence and sepulchral commentary, it is good to see that the Composers Alliance and CUNY are making every effort to keep his music alive.
Milton Babbitt Retrospective
Friday, May 25, 2012, 7:30pm at CUNY Graduate Center
Elebash Recital Hall (365 Fifth Ave, New York) Free Admission
Program
None but the Lonely Flute (1991) Patricia Spencer, flute
Envoi (1990) Steven Beck and Zachary Bernstein, piano
Soli e Duettini (1989) Oren Fader, guitar, William Anderson, guitar
Melismata (1982) Karen Rostron, violin
Philomel (1964) Judith Bettina, soprano
Composition for Four Instruments (1948) Patricia Spencer, flute; Charles Neidich, clarinet; Joshua Modney, violin; Christopher Gross, cello
My Ends are My Beginnings (1978)Charles Neidich, clarinet
More Melismata (2006) Christopher Gross, Cello
Swan Song no. 1 (2003) Barry Cooper, flute; Robert Ingliss, oboe; William Anderson, mandolin
Oren Fader, guitar; Calvin Wiersma, violin; Susannah Chapman, cello; James Baker, conductor
On Saturday, Collide-O-Scope Music is presenting a varied program, including a Babbitt work as well, but mostly featuring music by emerging and mid-career composers. As is often the case, CoSM programs both works for conventional instrumentation and for sound objects that are decidedly unconventional. Here, the latter is represented by Lou Bunk’s “scratch-o-lin,” a cardboard contraption that he fervently attacks with a violin bow!
Collide-O-Scope Music presents “The Medium is the Music”
Alexandra Gardner: New Skin (2002)
James Romig: Walls Like These (2012)
Lou Bunk: Shreds of New Walls (2012) *
Christopher Bailey: Fantasy-Passacaglia After Hall and Oates II (2012) *
Lou Bunk: Study for Bowed Cardboard (2010)
Christopher Bailey: Outlying Afterward (2012) *
Michael Klingbeil: Vers La Courbe (2012) *
Milton Babbitt: Preludes, Interludes, and Postlude (1991)
with Agnès Vesterman, cello & Sylvain Lemêtre, percussion
ECM Records CD 2157
Dance music in multiple forms, from the saltarello, a Venetian dance dating back to the Fourteenth century, to Breton and Celtic folk music, as well as transcriptions of medieval era compositions, Renaissance era consort music, and contemporary fare, are featured on Saltarello, violist Garth Knox’s latest ECM CD. Among the early music slections, Particularly impressive is a Vivaldi concerto, performed in a duo arrangement for viola d’amore and cello. Its interpreters, Knox and Agnès Vesterman, take this continuo less opportunity to accentuate a supple contrapuntal interplay between soloist and bass line. Equally lovely is a piece that combines music by Hildegard and Machaut in a kind of medieval style mash-up. Also stirring is this duo’s version of John Dowland’s most famous piece, Lachrimae, perhaps known best in its incarnation as the song “Flow My Tears.”
Knox, who is a past member of both Ensemble Intercontemporain and the Arditti String Quartet, also performs the disc’s newer material with consummate musicality: he also has the bedeviling habit of making virtuosic writing sound far too easy to play (his poor violist colleagues!). Knox’s own composition, “Fuga Libre,” combines jazz rhythms and neo-baroque counterpoint with ever more complicated harmonic tension points and several instances in which Knox demonstrates various extended playing techniques. Meanwhile, Kaaija Saariaho’s Vent Nocturne, an eerily evocative and tremendously challenging piece for viola and electronics, is given a haunting, sonically sumptuous rendering.
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Tomorrow night, Knox celebrates the release of the CD at LPR (details below). Early music, new pieces by and for Knox, and lovely comestibles on menu and on tap? Sounds like my evening’s planned!
Event Details
Tuesday May 22nd – Doors open at 6:30, show starts at 7:30
Tonight, the Alabama Symphony, conducted by Justin Brown, appears at Carnegie Hall as part of Spring for Music, a week long celebration of out-of-town orchestras with adventurous programming aesthetics. Many of them are making their Carnegie Hall debuts; all of them are bringing programs of interest and demonstrating that, despite the oft-reported economic vicissitudes in the world of classical music, there remains a tremendous vitality of orchestral music making throughout North America.
Quattro Mani
In addition to a repertory standby, Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, the ASO presents two New York premieres of pieces they commissioned: Avner Dorman’s Astrolatry and Paul Lansky’s Shapeshifters. The latter work is a double piano concerto for the duo Quattro Mani.
The same forces recently recorded it, as well as two other pieces by Lansky, for Bridge . The disc, titled Imaginary Islands, shows off Lansky’s music at its most colorful, filled with virtuosic passages for the soloists and formidably propulsive post-minimal writing for the orchestra. The composer’s take on minimal figuration is a fascinating marriage of an “enhanced” harmonic palette, one evocative of Messiaen as often as it is of Adams, with crackling ostinati and pileups of syncopation.
The recording demonstrates how far the ASO has come in a relatively short period of time: less than twenty years ago (in 1993), the orchestra had declared bankruptcy and its future was very much in doubt. The musicians and Brown, who soon departs from his position as their music director, should be proud of the successes the ASO has enjoyed in recent years. The standard of playing has risen, the orchestra’s programming has included a number of new works including several commissions, and they have been featured on several recording projects. This week’s visit to Carnegie Hall: a well-deserved victory lap!
On Tuesday evening in New York City, Edmonton is taking Carnegie Hall by storm.
The “Spring for Music” series, a yearly Carnegie event, is an opportunity for symphony orchestras around North America to come and present their work in New York City- an opportunity that would not necessarily be possible for some of these orchestras if “Spring for Music” did not exist. This Tuesday will see the Carnegie debut of the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra, an up-and-coming star in the symphonic world.
The Edmonton Symphony Orchestra is celebrating its 60-year anniversary this year. An integral and beloved part of the Edmonton community, the orchestra is travelling to Carnegie to present a program made up mostly of works they have commissioned over the years, with the exception of Martinu’s first symphony. There is something thrilling about the three Canadian composers being featured on the program. Their voices are unique, in a way that only 21st-Century composers could be. Their inspirations and tastes range from Beethoven, to Brahms, to Stravinsky, to Adams; and they were not shy to have open conversations with me about their work.
