Author: bfc-admin

The Los Angeles Philharmonic has “liberated musicians and transformed great swaths of our city’s musical life,” writes Mark Swed in Friday’s (11/21) Los Angeles Times. “And there is no better time than now—with the L.A. Phil out of town wowing Mexico City, London and, let’s hope, Boston and New York—to recognize that, broadly speaking, the community of musicians has become our zeitgeist. It includes musicians themselves along with institutions. Last weekend, for instance, the Pasadena Symphony and Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra seemed remarkably in sync. Saturday, Pasadena’s music director, David Lockington, opened his program at Ambassador Auditorium with Ellen Reid’s 15-minute ‘Petrichor.’ Across town the next night at UCLA, LACO’s new music director, Jaime Martin, gave the West Coast premiere of Missy Mazzoli’s ‘Dark With Excessive Bright’ in Royce Hall. Both works … had their premieres in February 2018. The composers are in their mid-to-late 30s and are friends. More than that, ‘Petrichor’ was commissioned by LACO, where Reid serves as composer-in-residence…. Mazzoli’s score is a double bass concerto with its own immersive elements…. Well-known L.A. freelancers, much heard over the last two weeks, demonstrated just how a utopian musical society might work.” 

Posted November 22, 2019

In photo: The Los Angeles Philharmonic and Music Director Gustavo Dudamel

The Austin Symphony Orchestra’s November 22 and 23 concerts of two Mozart works—the Symphony No. 36 and Overture to La Clemenza di Tito—will also feature Compassion, a 2013 song cycle by Australian composer Nigel Westlake, composed with Israeli-born Australian singer-songwriter Lior Attar. The Austin Symphony first performed Compassion in 2016, led by Music Director Peter Bay; Bay will conduct this November’s performances at the Long Center in Austin, Texas, with Lior Attar as soloist. The work will be sung in Hebrew and Arabic, with English supertitles. A September 2016 article in the Austin American-Statesman noted that Compassion was composed after Westlake’s son Eli died in 2008 at age 22. Lior Attar, a friend of Westlake’s son, performed at a fundraising concert for a foundation established in Eli’s honor, which “inspired a collaboration between Westlake and Lior.”

Posted November 22, 2019

“He jammed with Bernstein and Duke Ellington. He played with the Cincinnati Symphony for 35 years. He played the White House. He founded Cincinnati’s premiere chamber music series. He opened an art gallery,” writes David Lyman in Sunday’s (11/17) Cincinnati Enquirer (OH). “Who knows what else Dick Waller has in store for us? After all, he’s only 90. His big-9 birthday was Saturday, Nov. 16. … He got the job with the CSO back in 1960. He was the concertmaster of the Navy Band at the time. He’d heard the orchestra was looking for a clarinet player…. Unexpectedly, he was connected directly to Maestro Max Rudolf…. Says Waller, ‘I got to audition in his living room.’ … In 1974 … Waller started painting. He had no lessons, no background in the visual arts…. Forty years after that first painting—in 2014—he opened a small gallery on West Court Street. [He cofounded] the Linton Chamber Music Series with his then-wife Rosemary Waller…. He wanted to create a place where like-minded musicians could gather and share the intimacy of small-ensemble music…. Every one [of his paintings] is titled ‘Contrasts’ followed by a Roman numeral. The title is an homage to Bartók’s trio for clarinet, violin and piano.”

Posted November 22, 2019

“Opera Philadelphia’s next composer-in-residence is a musical polymath whose work bridges a wide range of influences and genres,” writes Peter Dobrin in Thursday’s (11/21) Philadelphia Inquirer. “Tyshawn Sorey—a percussionist, pianist, conductor, trombonist, composer, and 2017 MacArthur Fellow—will spend the next year or two immersing himself in the elements of a genre new to him. Sorey grew up in Newark, N.J., and is a professor at Wesleyan University. Although he has never written an opera, his appointment grew out of Cycles of My Being, a set of emotionally complex songs he composed for Opera Philadelphia exploring the African American male experience. It premiered at the Kimmel Center in 2018…. The residency begins this week … The company hopes the residency will lead to the commissioning of a work from Sorey…. Sorey’s residency this season is funded by the final year of a three-year grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation…. As a composer and performer, he embraces … Eastern music, Western classical music, improvisation, and atonality…. ‘I don’t necessarily see some big grand opera, like Monteverdi,’ he said, ‘but I am looking to do something that is totally myself within the opera genre.’ ”

Posted November 22, 2019

“In the fall of 2013, the vocalist Lucy Dhegrae performed a solo called ‘Dithyramb,’ ” writes Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim in Thursday’s (11/21) New York Times. “The five-minute piece, written by Jason Eckardt, consists of cries, truncated syllables and sharp sibilant sounds…. From the audience, it looked like self-asphyxiation. ‘It’s supposed to be a prayer to Dionysus, the god of ecstasy,’ Ms. Dhegrae said of the piece…. ‘And the entire time I thought about what had happened and how I had not talked about it—and would it ever go away.’ As a freshman at the University of Michigan, Ms. Dhegrae had been drugged and raped…. The trauma of her assault is the subject of Ms. Dhegrae’s four-concert Processing Series, which opens on Saturday at National Sawdust in Brooklyn. The series attempts to shed light on the complex relationship between mind and body…. Soon [after that ‘Dithyramb’ performance Deghrae] found she could no longer sing…. In Neil Semer, Ms. Dhegrae finally found a singing teacher who understood the connection between psychological states and the voice.” Composers whose works will be performed on the series include Eve Beglarian, Caleb Burhans, Osnat Netzer, and Katherine Young.

Posted November 22, 2019

“A concert performance of Act III of Wagner’s ‘Tannhäuser,’ a centennial celebration of renowned violinist Isaac Stern’s signature works, a bounty of Beethoven, and the 20th anniversary of John Williams’s Film Night are the central features of the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s upcoming summer season at Tanglewood,” writes Zoë Madonna in Thursday’s (11/21) Boston Globe. “Music director Andris Nelsons will lead the BSO in twelve programs…. The weekend-long Stern celebration will [include] violinists Augustin Hadelich, Midori, and Joshua Bell…. The Tanglewood Festival Chorus celebrates its 50th anniversary this summer with many performances … including Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 3 … and Berlioz’s Requiem. … With Music from Copland House, mezzo-soprano Susan Graham will sing the world premiere of ‘A Standing Witness,’ a BSO co-commissioned collaboration between composer Richard Danielpour and former U.S. poet laureate Rita Dove…. The Boston Pops and conductor Keith Lockhart support Phish’s Trey Anastasio in a Popular Artists series concert…. The Tanglewood Learning Institute is planning … lectures, performances, art classes, and three immersion weekends…. Tanglewood Music Center Fellows and participants in [BBC] Radio 3’s New Generation Artists program will present a series of free lunchtime recitals at the Linde Center for Music and Learning.”

Posted November 22, 2019

“When Courtney Bryan was a child growing up in New Orleans, her parents brought her to performances by the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra,” writes Dean M. Shapiro in Saturday’s (11/16) NOLA.com (New Orleans). “Little did she know that, more than 20 years later, the LPO would be premiering a work that the orchestra commissioned from her. Bryan’s 12-minute piece titled ‘Rejoice’ will have its world premiere … this weekend…. The piece will lead off the program, followed by Hector Berlioz’s Les nuits d’été … and Mozart’s Requiem. LPO Music Director Carlos Miguel Prieto will conduct … ‘This commission means a lot to me in a lot of ways,’ said Bryan…. The LPO was the first orchestra she ever heard, and it has performed other works of hers, but this is her first commissioned piece [for] them…. The work, Bryan explained, was inspired by passages in the New Testament … that extol the virtues of forgiveness and thankfulness for blessings … Composed for a full orchestra, the piece has no lyrics but Bryan noted that ‘the melodies and the rhythms of the melodies are basically like the words from the Bible.’ ” Bryan’s Rejoice was commissioned by the League of American Orchestras with the generous support of the Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation. 

Posted November 22, 2019

“A few hundred students filed into the Franklin Elementary School gymnasium,” writes Scott Girard in Thursday’s (11/21) Capital Times (Madison, WI). “The room quieted, with only the sound of four musicians playing Mozart’s ‘Hunt’ String Quartet, a piece with the same name as the group itself. The quartet, a partnership between the Madison Symphony Orchestra and the Mead Witter School of Music at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was making its second visit to the school this year as part of the ‘Up Close and Musical’ program led by MSO. The 21-year-old program has a quartet visit up to six elementary schools in the area four times each year…. At the end of the year, students from all of the schools attend an MSO concert with the full symphony…. The students listened to the four members of the quartet—Rachel Reese, Alex Chambers-Ozasky, Ava Shadmani and Fabio Sággin—explain ascending and descending melodies…. Students at times pretended to conduct the group from their seats, and excitedly yelled out ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’ when they recognized the piece. Said Franklin music teacher Megan Moran, “They’re not only making these musical connections, but making the connections with these musicians.”

Posted November 22, 2019

In photo: Students at Franklin Elementary School listen to the Hunt Quartet, a partnership of the Madison Symphony Orchestra and the Mead Witter School of Music at UW-Madison, on Wednesday, Nov. 20. Photo by Scott Girard