image(2)

OUR World Digital Stage

Philadelphia,
The Philadelphia Orchestra musicians are together again on the Verizon Hall stage in Philadelphia, in masks or positioned behind Plexiglas partitions, performing in an otherwise empty concert hall. Their concerts are being filmed for the orchestra’s rebooted fall Digital  ...
71jp3DPG8AL._SX522_

Philip Glass: Symphony for Solo Piano

Musical transcriptions have been around for millenia, even before the medieval, baroque, classical, romantic, modernist and postmodernist periods of the all hallowed western tradition which means both its European and its American incarnations. But do we  ...
Photo: Jeff Fusco

Philadelphia Orchestra

Philadelphia,
Philadelphia Orchestra maestro  Yannick Nézet-Séguin returned to the stage with the orchestra after six months, on the day it was announced that Metropolitan Opera, where he is also musical-director, would remain shut down for another year, The Philadelphians were  ...
1600x685_akhnaten2

Philip Plass’ Akhnaten at the Met

New York,
A WORD FROM THE AUTHOR: Please excuse the lateness of this piece but three versions of it that I wrote which were in "Draft " disappeared thrice so I had to re-write it thrice and re-think  ...
Balloons

Sad by Southwest: Tales from a Cancelled Festival

Austin,
South-by-Southwest (a.k.a. SXSW) began in Austin, TX as a music festival in 1987, continuously expanding in the years since to feature movies, TV, comedy, games, art, podcasting, and conferences/exhibits on everything from education and sports to politics and cutting  ...
THE DAY

THE DAY

San Francisco,
“I remember the day…” On the surface, “THE DAY” is a multilayered performance with iconoclastic cellist Maya Beiser and retired ballerina turned dance experimentalist, Wendy Whelan. This collaborative project, done in two parts, is the inspiration  ...
Angela Meade as Queen Elizabeth. Photo: Craig T. Mathew

Roberto Devereux

Los Angeles,
Don’t think that the movies have exclusive title to making bio-pics. Opera has been at it for years. Donizetti set a brilliant example in 1837 with “Roberto Devereux,” third in a trio of works about the Tudor monarchy. I  ...
cal-performances-kronos-quartet-fifty-for-the-future-8-waleed-shah (2)

A Thousand Thoughts

Berkeley,
“A Thousand Thoughts, a thousand questions, mine, yours, ours, theirs, questions that perhaps open up things that definitive answers would only nail shut. Kronos Quartet’s long trajectory offers a series of questions that are solid and answers are elusive.  ...
Photo: Cory Weaver

Eurydice

Los Angeles,
It’s still the same old story, a search for love and glory. Okay, so I paraphrased it. To hear playwright Sarah Ruhl and composer Matthew Aucoin tell it, Orpheus (Joshua Hopkins) is a god when he is creating music,  ...
Untitled+design+(3)

Four Arab / International New Music CDs

Much has been made of the stylistic freedom composers now enjoy. The Gordian knot of the 12-note system has been cut and few composers save those in the academy seem even tempted to write in the 12-note  ...