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The three years in which Michael Gordon has been composer-in-residence at Merkin Concert Hall have seen a marked increase in the amount of downtown music to be found north of 14th Street and south of Columbia University — not a wholesale incursion by any means, but certainly a steady trickle. Located just north of Lincoln…
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It’s my own fault, and I know it. The last two times I had a post disappear due to browser-interface anxieties, I swore it would never happen again. "I’ll be smarter next time, you’ll see." (I even sketched notes in longhand during intermissions at the Met’s Rigoletto tonight.) But, having eagerly spent more than three…
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Per Alex Ross (who heard about it from Lev Zhurbin), I urge you to take a moment to see and hear the new Honda Civic commercial that’s soon to be storming up the charts in the UK. Composer Steve Sidwell was given the task of creating the sounds of — and, presumably, expressing the excitement…
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January 27, as you are inescapably aware, was the Big Day for the Mozart year. But after hearing two concerts by John Eliot Gardiner, a knockout Così and a handful of good-to-great new Mozart CDs this week, I didn’t feel especially compelled to hear more. I wasn’t the only one, but while Alex Ross’s abstention…
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Everyone remember Anne Midgette’s nifty December 4, 2005 Times article about Met cover artists? I sure do… and even if I didn’t, I was reminded of it this afternoon, when a publicist sent me a press release that pertained to one of the artists Anne profiled. From Anne’s piece: Jeff Mattsey, a baritone, has had…
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Being Osvaldo Golijov probably isn’t as easy or fun as we might think. To be annointed as some kind of savior of contemporary composition is bound to be a thankless task: You’ve got to live up to seemingly impossible standards, while also dodging skepticism of various slants. In conversation, Golijov is unfailingly humble — and…
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Good grief, don’t know how exactly I forgot to mention it, but Justin Davidson, guest hosting The Rest Is Noise for a spell, wittily describes the mighty, throbbing incursion of noise during John Eliot Gardiner’s performance of the Mozart C-minor Mass on Sunday afternoon. It was a major nuisance, to be sure. But there was…
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According to Pinchas Zukerman, I wasted my time tonight, and yesterday afternoon as well. In a fairly rabid interview that appeared in the Orange County Register last week, Zukerman unloaded both barrels at the period-instruments movement… or "historically informed performance" (HIP), in the current nomenclature. "I disagree with everything they do," Zukerman said. "From the…
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I don’t normally spend all that much time here trumpeting the efforts of the magazine for which I work, but there are a handful of fun things in this week’s issue that I’d like to bring to your attention. First, in a cover story about 25 up-and-coming New York creative types, there’s a brief shout-out…
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A quiet night, in which I rejected the call to keep working after hours (on my "official" daytime work, anyway) and instead finally got around to updating the blogroll here. Any blog is a work in progress, but by this point it was verging on obscene that I hadn’t yet provided handy links to such…
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I have to admit, the question crossed my mind pretty much immediately when I heard that Peter Gelb was to be the next chief of the Metropolitan Opera. I’d actually pondered it as recently as this afternoon, for no particular reason. And apparently, I’m not the only one who’s been wondering, because it was the…
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It’s a gloomy, wet, steel-gray evening in Manhattan. For some reason, that made it a perfect day to listen to La Cieca’s wonderful Birgit Nilsson podcasts, as well as the searing renditions of Hindemith, Mendelssohn, Dvorak and Shostakovich violin concerti found in a Brilliant Classics box set of radio recordings by David Oistrakh. (I picked…
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In the latest issue of TONY — the one with President Eisenhower’s placid mug on the cover — you’ll find a pithy little one-page feature by yours truly about the Osvaldo Golijov festival that opens in Lincoln Center on Sunday, January 22. The piece in question isn’t deep and probing, nor was it meant to…
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Everybody else is doing has already done it. Four jobs you’ve had in your life: Floor cleaner; busboy; classical radio DJ; publicist. Four movies you could watch over and over: Casablanca; Gigi; Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid; any James Bond film. Four places you’ve lived: Jacksonville, FL; Houston, TX; San Antonio, TX; New York, NY.…
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Composer, lyricist and vocalist Corey Dargel, whose praises I’ve already sung in an earlier post, offered a glimpse of a new music-theater piece on Monday night at HERE, a currently homely (due to renovation) but always cozy arts workshop in the un-nicknamed hinterlands between the West Village and TriBeCa. Presented under the auspices of an…
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The holidays were a long stretch with little consumption of live music — though not a total void, thanks to baritone saxophonist Claire Daly‘s congenially swinging quartet at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola and Cassandra Wilson‘s idiosyncratic intimacies at the Blue Note. But for this observer, musical 2006 finally roared, thumped and pogoed to life last night…
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Dan Warburton — fine improvising musician, exceptional writer about musicians who improvise, and editor-in-chief of the outstanding new-music journal Paris Transatlantic — has gently clarified that while Derek Bailey spent his final years in Barcelona, he actually passed from this life in London.
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I can’t remember the first time I heard British guitarist Derek Bailey, but I do remember being utterly perplexed at the arid, unsettling chaos his music seemed to present. A pioneer in the European free-improvisation scene of the late ’60s and early ’70s, Bailey was among the foremost proponents of a… style? genre? Okay, a…
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Sorry about the longer-than-usual absence. Chalk it up to a general lack of live performances over the last few weeks, the transit strike, my girlfriend’s return from Virginia and the year-end crush at the magazine. Speaking of which, the December 29 issue of TONY — which went to print three weeks ago — is hitting…
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On the street and the subway this evening, as I left the office and headed to the Met, I listened to Rolando Villazón’s recording of arias by Massenet and Gounod — a fine disc, and one that easily claims a spot on my list of "Top Ten Recordings That Didn’t End Up on My TONY…
Night After Night 