The First of My Slice of the Proms
The slice of the Proms which I’m getting this summer seems less of full of twentieth and twenty-first century music than usual. Works of Gunther Schuller, Simon Holt, Harrison Birtwistle, Stockhausen,...
View ArticleBliss in Edinburgh
The BBC Symphony Orchestra provided the pit band for the European premiere of Brett Dean's opera Bliss at the Edinburgh International Festival . Sub-principal viola Phil Hall was doing his bit for...
View ArticleProms 72/73: BBCSO/Belohlavek; Penguin Cafe/Tickell, Royal Albert Hall (4/5,...
How should we listen to a complicated piece of new music? The premiere of Tansy Davies’s ‘Wild Card’ raised this simple-seeming question – to which the correct answer is not ‘let it wash over you’ – in...
View ArticleSuggesting a Feminine Side to the NY Phil
Errollyn Wallen Following up on Alex Ross’ post about the New York Philharmonic’s 2011-’12 season, which mentioned the lack of representation of American composers on the Contact! series and women...
View ArticleAlbum: Tansy Davies, Troubairitz (Nonclassical)
The full range of Tansy Davies's varied modernist interests is displayed on Troubairitz, from the title suite itself, a song-cycle based on 19th-century poems by women troubadours, sung here either a...
View ArticleTansy Davies’ Troubairitz
Tansy Davies Toubairitz Anna Snow, voice; Damien Harron, percussion; Azalea Ensemble; Christopher Austin, conductor Nonclassical CD A constant, if sometimes subtly articulated, pulse runs through much...
View ArticleFive-Spot: What caught my eye on December 15, 2011
By Robert D. Thomas Music Critic Pasadena Star-News/San Gabriel Valley Tribune/Whittier Daily News __________ Each Thursday morning, I list five events that pique my interest, including (ideally) at...
View ArticleBarbican 2012-13 orchestral
Karol Szymanowski everywhere this year! Szymanowski was Poland's "first modernist", a cosmopolitan intellectual and contemporary of Bartók, dismissed by the Communist Party for his aesthetic...
View ArticleSpoleto Festival USA 2012 Opera and Classical Music Programs Feature 8 U.S....
Works by composers Philip Glass (U.S.), Guo Wenjing ( China ), Jonny Greenwood ( UK ), Tansy Davies ( UK ), Toshi Ichiyanagi ( Japan ), Toshio Hosokawa ( Japan ), Somei Satoh ( Japan ), Hooshyar Khayam...
View ArticlePlaylist.
Marillion - Sounds That Can't Be Made (E.A.R. Music) Toshimaru Nakamura/English - One Day (Erstwhile) William Duckworth - The Time Curve Preludes - R. Andrew Lee (Irritable Hedgehog, via Bandcamp )...
View ArticleWoods To Join Orchestra of the Swan
The Stratford-Upon-Avon based Orchestra of the Swan have announced the appointment of American musician Kenneth Woods as their Principal Guest Conductor from 2010. Woods, who just completed his tenure...
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