Pierre Boulez has been haunting the New York Philharmonic mercilessly. On Monday night at the fashionable Williamsburg, Brooklyn venue known as National Sawdust, the recently deceased composer was heard alongside the French contemporary he often hated, Olivier Messiaen, as well as younger somewhat-modernist composers such as George Benjamin and Oliver Knussen. Hosting was a … [Read more...] about Boulez haunts the Philharmonic – with music from from his noisy youth
David Amram at 85: Distilling his multiple personalities
He doesn't look much older than when he was 60. But he's showing his age in a way that true artists do. His 2014 piece, Greenwich Village Portraits, is one of his very best. David Amram has led multiple lives simultaneously. He's a jazz musician able to improvise an actual song on the spot, the master of many ethnic and folk musics who plays at Farm Aid concerts (and fits … [Read more...] about David Amram at 85: Distilling his multiple personalities
Bach at the Armory – with gongs, noise-canceling headphones and deck chairs
Every concert should be as comfortable as this. Goldberg, a new performance art piece created by Marina Abramovic that involved a full performance of Bach's Goldberg Variations, was a marriage made in ... well, the drill hall of the Park Avenue Armory in New York. Abramovic was quoted as saying she would make audiences suffer for their Bach - a scary prospect: one of her … [Read more...] about Bach at the Armory – with gongs, noise-canceling headphones and deck chairs
John Luther Adams makes the earth speak (while tourists cover their ears)
John Luther Adams often seems like an Alaska Impressionist - or so I've said in the past, perhaps misleadingly. The implication of that moniker implies pretty-sounding Arctic Debussy, something more descriptive than Sibelius and surely full of more bears than lions and tigers. In fact, Adams (who lived in Alaska for years) has an all-embracing attitude toward sound that … [Read more...] about John Luther Adams makes the earth speak (while tourists cover their ears)
The Pope, the music and the evacuation
A pope without music is like a ship without a flag. It's part of the papal aura - but, unlike incense, it doesn't send your sinuses into spasms. At the Festival of Families Saturday night on Philadelphia's Benjamin Franklin Parkway, the music at a gala concert in Pope Francis's honor was quite secondary - almost a footnote that was all-too-easily ignored, even with … [Read more...] about The Pope, the music and the evacuation