Tag: Composers

Lincoln Center Announces Summer Festival Programming

Posted on April 17, 2025 by - News Briefs

In Wednesday’s (4/16) New York Times, Javier C. Hernández writes, “Lincoln Center’s summer festival will highlight the city’s diverse cultural traditions … including performances by an experimental collective; a celebration of Brazilian culture; and the staging of a Sanskrit epic…. The festival, Summer for the City, will run June 11 through Aug. 9, and it will also include a six-performance engagement by the string quartet Brooklyn Rider to celebrate the group’s 20th anniversary. Since the festival began, in 2022, it has scaled back the classical music and opera programming that used to define summer events like the Lincoln Center Festival and the Mostly Mozart Festival. This edition is a restoration of some of those types of offerings…. The American Modern Opera Company will perform the New York premiere of ‘The Comet/Poppea,’ which pairs George Lewis’s adaptation of W.E.B. Du Bois’s story ‘The Comet’ and Monteverdi’s ‘L’Incoronazione di Poppea.’ Additional programming … includes a staging of Messiaen’s song cycle ‘Harawi,’ sung by the soprano Julia Bullock, and … Matthew Aucoin’s ‘Music for New Bodies’ … The Festival Orchestra of Lincoln Center, under the baton of its music and artistic director Jonathon Heyward, will perform a mix of new and old. Each of its programs will feature at least one living composer. But the ensemble will also perform Robert Schumann’s Fourth Symphony, Clara Schumann’s Konzertsatz in F minor, Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony and other classic works.”

St. Louis Symphony and Mizzou New Music Initiative Support Work of Student Composers

Posted on April 16, 2025 by - News Briefs

In Wednesday’s (4/16) St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Rosalind Early writes, “When the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra performs at the Sheldon on April 24, the concert will include a world premiere from composer Yoell Tewolde, a sophomore at University of Missouri-Columbia [Mizzou]. Tewolde wrote the piece, ‘Waves on the Shore’ as part of Mizzou’s New Music Initiative. Students in Mizzou’s composition program apply to get the chance to hear their pieces played by SLSO musicians. ‘This is my first time working with musicians from a symphony orchestra,’ Tewolde says. ‘The musicians are really high caliber, so it’s very exciting.’… Tewolde straddles the classical and jazz worlds. He first came to music through classical piano, which he started in second grade. In seventh grade, he started playing the saxophone … Tewolde found out that he’d be contributing a piece to the SLSO concert series last fall and started working on it in a composition class … at Mizzou…. Everyone in the New Music Initiative writes a new piece…. In addition to Tewolde’s piece, [on April 24] the symphony ensemble will play pieces from Ravel, Poulenc, Florent Schmitt, Giles Silvestrini and Germaine Tailleferre…. From January through April, the SLSO has been playing the new compositions from different students in its Live at the Sheldon concert series.”

Opinion: How to Define Classical Music in Our Rapidly Evolving World?

Posted on April 16, 2025 by - News Briefs

In the May 2025 issue of The Atlantic, Matthew Aucoin writes, “I’m a composer and conductor in the field that’s broadly known as Western classical music, a term that’s routinely applied to radically different idioms across more than 1,000 years of musical history. Within this huge array, you’ll find the engulfing sonorities of William Byrd’s choral music; the intimate revelations, too private for words, in chamber works by Franz Schubert and Anton Webern; the majestic topography of Jean Sibelius’s orchestral landscapes; and, more recently, a multitude of works by composers as different from one another as Chaya Czernowin, Tyshawn Sorey, and Thomas Adès. The unruly and elusive entity known as classical music does not sound like any one thing, and the sheer abundance of the tradition might invite the conclusion that trying to define it at all is a hopeless exercise. But that would be a mistake, especially at this moment. Like every other sector of cultural life, classical music has been roiled over the past decade by intense debates … The stakes of these discussions … have at times felt existential … What is classical music, whom is it for, and what about it is worth defending?”

Symphony of Northwest Arkansas Celebrates Music Director Paul Haas’s Penultimate Concert

Posted on April 15, 2025 by - News Briefs

In Saturday’s (4/12) Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette (Fayetteville), Monica Hooper writes, “The finale of the Symphony of Northwest Arkansas’s 2024-25 MainStage Season will be bittersweet. Even though it got the soloist of its dreams for the symphony’s first-ever performance of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, the concert marks the departure of Paul Haas, who has led the orchestra for 15 seasons…. ‘We really want to use this opportunity to celebrate him and everything that he’s done for this community and this orchestra before he plays his last note with us,’ said Ben Harris, SoNA executive director. Haas announced his plans to leave in August. Following the ‘American Voices: Rhapsody in Blue’ concert, the audience is invited to raise a glass to Haas in the lobby of the Walton Arts Center…. Stewart Goodyear will be the featured soloist for Gershwin’s work … SoNA opens the concert with William Grant Still’s Afro-American Symphony No. 1 and closes with Florence Price’s Symphony No. 1…. Harris said he’s excited to unveil plans for next season, but this concert will be a celebration of Haas, who will conduct one more time with SoNA, the annual Fourth of July concert at the AMP.”

Cheyenne Symphony Spotlights Latin American Composers

Posted on April 15, 2025 by - News Briefs

In the April 4 Wyoming Tribune Eagle (Cheyenne), Taylor Staples writes, “For Cheyenne Symphony Orchestra Maestro William Intriligator, a concert like ‘Fiesta’ has been a long time coming. CSO’s second-to-last performance for its 70th season is headed to the Civic Center on April 12 … CSO has done at least one other all-Latin-composers concert in the last seven or eight years, according Intriligator. The last time they put on a Latin concert, they reached out to the local Latino community and were able to get a mariachi band, as well as the local dance troupe Las Angelitas Unidas y Los Rayos del Sol  … They’ll be joining the orchestra this year … The piece that will kick off the concert is … Arturo Marquez’s Danzón No. 2. Intriligator said this piece is usually deemed a concert-ender due to how wild it can get…. Soloist Charles Gorczynski [will] play three movements from a bandoneon concerto, Astor Piazzolla’s ‘Aconcagua.’… CSO will also feature Gorczynski in a lecture demonstration about the bandoneon on April 10 in the library … Daniela Guzmán Égüez … a soprano soloist from Ecuador [will] sing Heitor Villa-Lobos’ ‘Bachiana Brasilerias No. 5.’… The fourth piece is called ‘Latin American Dances’ by Mexican composer José Elizondo…. The night will end with four movements from … ‘Estancia’ by Argentinian composer Alberto Ginastera.”

Review: Pacific Symphony’s “Das Rheingold”

Posted on April 15, 2025 by - News Briefs

In Saturday’s (4/12) Culture Orange County (California), Timothy Mangan writes, “We are pleased to report that the Pacific Symphony’s production of Richard Wagner’s ‘Das Rheingold,’ which opened Thursday night at Segerstrom Concert Hall, features helmets with horns. Wagner without horned helmets is somehow lacking …. And they were good helmets, with very good horns…. One was pleasantly surprised, once again, by how well ‘Rheingold’ holds the stage, not as socio-political commentary (which it is), but as a theatrical entertainment…. The individual characters all speak (well, sing) from a deep cauldron of emotion and motivation, and the orchestra, rarely mere accompaniment, offers a wealth of commentary, doom and gloom, and splendid visions…. The production … is part of the Pacific Symphony’s annual opera offering, given a semi-staged presentation. Over the years, the semi-staged part of the equation has been rather ambitiously undertaken … The singers gave pleasure, and sounded as if they were enjoying themselves…. Carl St.Clair led the orchestra with a steady hand. Having conducted a ‘Ring’ cycle in Weimar … he has long wanted to bring ‘Rheingold’ to this orchestra’s opera series … and this being his last season as music director he finally did it. Throughout the two and a half hours, he never lost sight of momentum.”

Boston Symphony Orchestra Announces 2025-26 Season

Posted on April 11, 2025 by - News Briefs

In Thursday’s (4/10) Boston Globe, AZ Madonna writes, “In its 2025-2026 season, the Boston Symphony Orchestra will honor the United States’s 250th anniversary with a wide-ranging exploration of American music, featuring three dozen works by American composers past and present. The 125th anniversary of Symphony Hall will also be commemorated with Beethoven’s ‘Missa Solemnis,’ which was performed at the hall’s October 1900 inaugural concert, and other music from the turn of the 20th century. Additional themed programming intended to stretch across seasons will explore music’s intersections with religious faith and the natural world … The orchestra’s approach to American music next season is shaped by the words ‘E Pluribus Unum’—’from many, one,’ said BSO president and CEO Chad Smith … [and] ‘represents the beginning of a deep exploration of the humanities’ in the orchestra’s work, with more supplementary events hosted by the BSO’s humanities institute … ‘E Pluribus Unum’ highlights [include] concert performances of Samuel Barber’s ‘Vanessa’ presented in collaboration with Boston Lyric Opera … and the Boston premiere of BSO composer chair Carlos Simon’s gospel-inspired ‘Good News Mass,’ conducted by BSO artistic partner and youth and family concerts conductor Thomas Wilkins…. [Music Director Andris] Nelsons is helming 14 different programs during the season … The Boston Pops also have several dates—most of them conducted by Keith Lockhart.”

Akron Symphony Announces 2025-26 Season

Posted on April 9, 2025 by - News Briefs

In Friday’s (4/4) WKYC (Cleveland), Justin McMullen writes, “The Akron Symphony’s 2025-26 season, as music director Christopher Wilkins puts it, is like a menu…. The ASO’s next season is filled with meaty entrees, highlighted by major works like Mahler’s Symphony No. 1, Stravinsky’s ‘Firebird’ Suite, Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, and Handel’s ‘Messiah.’ ‘These are the great works that people hanker for, our signature dishes,’ Wilkins says, also shouting out pieces like Carl Orff’s cantata ‘Carmina Burana’ and Aaron Copland’s Americana-inspired ‘Appalachian Spring.’… Helping to round out the prix fixe: film music by Hans Zimmer and Danny Elfman, a program that pairs a movement of Duke Ellington’s ‘Three Black Kings’ with Leonard Bernstein’s Symphonic Dances from ‘West Side Story,’ Haydn’s trumpet concerto performed by the ASO’s talented young section principal Justin Kohan and more … [including] Clara Schumann’s Piano Concerto in A Minor’ and a string and harp setting of the late Akron composer Julia Perry’s ‘Ye, Who Seek the Truth’ … The orchestra will also give a world premiere of a new work by Margaret Brouwer.” The article lists the Akron Symphony’s complete classical season for 2025-26.