Music
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Composer Librettists Development Program
Lawrence Edelson Celebrates Opera
By: - Sep 28th, 2017American Lyric Theater was founded in 2005. Lawrence Edelson, a tenor and stage director, wondered how best to develop national operas. When opera was first introduced to the US was intentionally European and elitist. That formula no longer works. New works are springing up all over the country, and the ALT and its composer librettist programs has trained and launched the careers of many of this generations' composers and librettists. At the heart of their program is a kind of master's degree in opera. It is based on mentorship, which subtly differs from teaching.
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Principles of Uncertainty at BAM
John Heginbotham and Maira Kalman
By: - Sep 29th, 2017John Heginbotham of DH Dance wanted to work with Maira Kalman after he read her books. They walked together, drank coffee, talked and decided they'd like to do something. They had no idea what. Jacob's Pillow premiered the result in August. Now it is playing at BAM in Brooklyn.
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Don Pasquale Composed by Gaetano Donizetti
California's Livermore Valley Opera
By: - Oct 03rd, 2017Gaetano Donizetti’s Don Pasquale has only three things going for it – a sparkling score; a charming story of young love and old foolishness; and more humor than a barrel full of monkeys.
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The Carnegie Hall Season
Brave, Bold, Consummate Art
By: - Oct 03rd, 2017The science of time travel is not normally associated with the classical music business. And yet, one might argue that the finest time travel device in New York City stands not in some hidden laboratory but on the corner of 57th St. and Seventh Avenue. That's right, it's Carnegie Hall, whose 2017-18 season offers the intrepid listener a chance to travel between centuries and musical worlds.
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New York Philharmonic Continues Star Wars
Sometimes the Bad Guys Win
By: - Oct 03rd, 2017Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back is generally considered to be the best Star Wars film ever made. The dark middle chapter of the original trilogy came out in 1980 as the second movie released, and remains a firm fan favorite. It boasts an expanded universe, a complicated storyline alternating between the flight of Han Solo and Princess Leia from the evil and remorseless Darth Vader, and the Jedi training of Luke Skywalker at the hands of the diminutive but wise Yoda.
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Bounce Opens in Lexington, Kentucky
Basketball Opera Comes to Basketball's Home
By: - Oct 03rd, 2017Artists committed to the continuing attraction of opera as a form that draws an audience are experimenting. A workshop of Bounce, an opera conceived by Grete Holby and her Ardea Arts in conjunction with the University of Kentucky, is performed in a park in East Flatbush, Brooklyn. With dribbles as drumming and heros like Flight and Future, the future of opera itself is secured. Now this opera goes to the University of Kentucky, collaborators on its creation.
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Rev.23 Farce of an Opera
Comedy Based on Book of Revelations Nothing to Laugh Over
By: - Oct 03rd, 2017Cerise Lim Jacobs, whose "Ouroboros Trilogy" was so engaging last season returns with "Rev. 23," subtitled "A Farcial Hellish Opera!" that was less successful both thematically and musically. Is end-times and rebirth an appropriate subject for farce? The production was good to look at and the music-making was fine, but still.....
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Barrington Stage Announces Two Musicals for 2018
World Premiere of The Royal Family of Broadway & West Side Story
By: - Oct 05th, 2017It's not yet Holiday season and Barrington Stage is first out of the get with booking for the 2018 season It annouices. the world premiere of The Royal Family of Broadway, a new musical comedy based on The Royal Family by George S. Kaufman & Edna Ferber, by the Tony Award winning creators of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee; and West Side Story, in honor of Leonard Bernstein and Jerome Robbin’s 100th birthdays.
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Lincoln Center and NY Philharmonic Abandon Sound Plan
Mostly Mozart Offers a Repair Model
By: - Oct 05th, 2017The sound at David Geffen Hall during the fall and spring seasons is often awful. A six hundred million dollar plan, which would have brought the Hall to Lincoln Center Plaza level has been abandoned. Now there is talk of Mostly Mozart-ing the Hall.
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Carnegie Hall Opens with Philadelphia Orchestra
Four-Armed is Fore-Warned
By: - Oct 06th, 2017the original plan was to have Rhapsody's piano part played by Lang Lang, the international piano sensation and one of the biggest stars of this new firmament of young classical artists. Then Lang suffered an arm injury and plans were changed. The program still featured Rhapsody, but in a version fortwo pianos. The second was manned by Chick Corea, a beloved figure from the world of jazz. And serving as Lang Lang's left hand, his pupil Maxim Lando. At 14 years old, Lando is a product of Lang's International Music Foundation.
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Boulez at the Park Avenue Armory
Repons from IRCAM
By: - Oct 06th, 2017The Park Avenue Armory is presenting one of Pierre Boulez’ signature compositions, the first one to use IRCAM with all its innovation. Relatively simple material can be made to acquire sophisticated layers without losing the sound of its origins. Repons is the first product of IRCAM’s 4X computer.
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Crossing at BAM
Whitman Focus of Composer Matthew Aucoin
By: - Oct 08th, 2017Crossing premiered at ART in Cambridge, Mass. in 2015. Now it comes to BAM as part of the Next Wave Festival.
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Opera at the Apollo
We Shall Not Be Moved Triumphs
By: - Oct 09th, 2017We Shall Not Be Moved opened at the Apollo last weekend. Under the bright lights on the Apollo marquee on 125th Street in Harlem, the gathering crowd was dressed in high fashion, from tinsel and glitter to designer jeans and platform heels. Talk was all of the subject matter and the artists who had created this opera. Bill T. Jones is well-known, but the composer and librettist not so. People were going to see the work of their own community.
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Agostino Steffani's Vocal Duets Rediscovered
Italian-born Composer Worked in Germany
By: - Oct 12th, 2017Agostino Steffani (1653-1728) was important in his day, serving as a priest and diplomat as well as a composer, but he was forgotten after his death. The BEMF has devoted much of its attention to resuscitating his vocal works over the past 6 years. Its most recent research led to an enchanting concert of vocal duets, featuring local favorite Amanda Forsythe and colleagues from around the world.
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American Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall
Doing What's Right
By: - Oct 13th, 2017A peculiar sense of existential dread hung over Wednesday night’s concert at Carnegie Hall, the first of the young season featuring the American Symphony Orchestra under the baton of its long time music director Leon Botstein. For this concert, titled “The Sounds of Democracy”, Botstein chose 20th century music by Leonard Bernstein, Roger Sessions and Aaron Copland, leading lights of American music in the last century but now largely ignored by the fast-food reality-television culture of the 21st.
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Thomas Ades and Friends at Carnegie Hall
Warm up for The Exterminating Angel
By: - Oct 16th, 2017Thomas Adès will be Artistic Partner to the Boston Symphony Orchestra for the next three years, helping to fill their Maestro's wish for abundant new music. Adès' gifts as a composer were on display in Zankel Hall. Principals from the cast of his third opera, about to have its North American premier, sang. The music, his own, and that of Schubert, Britten and Purcell among others, could count as the music of his friends, from long ago and now. As a pianist, Adès has a special touch.
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Barnatan and Weilerstein at Carnegie
Woo Too with Mendelssohn and a New Steven Mackay
By: - Oct 18th, 2017Listening to two great artists performing cello sonatas at Zankel Hall, you are let in on a secret that should be widely broadcast. In intimate chamber music, performed with only two instruments, you enter the deep, developed world of great composers whose work is the subject of conversation. Chorale to recitative, pluck to bowed, arpeggios to long, sweet lines. Never a moment to rest as we are pulled closer and closer to the essence of a composer.
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Musical America Announces Awardees
Andris Nelsons, Sondra Radvanovsky, Mason Bates Honored
By: - Oct 17th, 2017The prestigious Musical America annual awards have been announced. The BSO musical director Andris Nelsons is artist of the year. Sondra Radvanovsky is vocalist. We interviewed Nelsons in 2011 before his first concert with the BSO at Carnegie Hall. Radvanofvsky has been on our radar since Peter Gelb tried to oust her and Placido Dominago stormed into his office and told him he could not remove an important artist from the Met roster.
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Boston Lyric Opera Tosca
Fine Cast but a Misguided Production
By: - Oct 20th, 2017Puccini's "Tosca" remains one of the most popular operas in the world 117 years after its debut. Today with its portrait of fascist tyrants taking women forcibly for their own pleasure, it has renewed relevance. In her American debut Russian soprano Elena Stikhina made the role her own.
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Gordon Getty Unearths Ghosts
A Pair of Seasonal Operas
By: - Oct 20th, 2017The Center for Contemporary Opera is presenting the premier of a pair of operas by Gordon Getty. One is based on Edgar Allan Poe’s The House of Usher. The other, on Oscar Wilde’s sympathetic take on a ghost who cannot die, poor guy.
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Prince of Egypt World Premiere
Music and Lyrics by Stephen Schwartz and Book by Philip LaZebnik
By: - Oct 21st, 2017This is a musical entertainment for the many, not a Sunday School lesson for the few.
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L’Orchestre Symphonique at Carnegie
The Idea of North
By: - Oct 21st, 2017L’Orchestre symphonique de Montréal is one of the finest symphonic ensembles in North America. They are a stellar symphonic ensemble with a long history and a sound all their own, combining precise European string playing with the lusty, leather-lunged brass one associated with this continent.
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Orchestra dell' Accademia Nationale at Carnegie
Barbara Hannigan Sings Sciarrino
By: - Oct 22nd, 2017Sir Antonio Pappano has made his mark at Royal Covent Garden over the past decade and a half. He is also the music director of the Orchestra dell' Accademia Nationale di Santa Cecilia (Rome). They return to Carnegie Hall after an almost half century absence. Pappano presented a work composer Salvatore Sciarrino wrote especially for the great and adventuresome soprano (and conductor) Barbara Hannigan. Mahler's Sixth Symphony followed.
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Dolores Claiborne by Tobias Picker
New York City Opera Hits a Home Run, Again
By: - Oct 27th, 2017New York City Opera's production of Tobias Picker's latest opera, Dolores Claiborne, honors the composer in a riveting theatrical presentation. Oliver Sacks explored the musical brain in his Musicophilia. The connection between the two hemispheres of the brain is enlarged demonstrably in talented musicians. So too a section of the hippocampus. Picker, who began composing at four, was studied by Sacks. Whether or not his brain reflects musicality because he started playing and composing early, or because he was born with this ability, remains to be answered. What is clear in Dolores Claiborne, as produced by NYCO, is how great his talent for opera is.
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Berlioz' Damnation of Faust at BSO
A Dramatic Legend Rides High
By: - Oct 29th, 2017Damnation of Faust turned out to be one of Berlioz' most popular compositions. It was the first work in which he wrote the libretto himself. Berlioz loved Virgil, Shakespeare, and Goethe above all. He could not entrust the words of these authors to anyone else. In Damnation, we have a great presentation of the Faust story. The Boston Symphony, Tanglewood chorus and thrilling soloists brought Berlioz safely to heaven and hell.
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