Last night I finally had a chance to hear David Lang’s The Little Match Girl Passion. The piece is a Carnegie Hall commission that had its world premiere in 2007 with Paul Hillier’s four-member Theatre of Voice.
If you were lucky enough to catch The Little Match Girl Passion premiere at Carnegie or have listened to it on the recent recording, you may agree with the judges who awarded the 35-minute work the Pulitzer Prize in 2008. It masterfully blends the simple tragedy of the Hans Christian Andersen story about a girl going door-to-door, barefoot, selling matches on the coldest night of the year, with a Bach-style passion structure of alternating narrated story passages and vocal commentary.
Lang has now rescored the work for chorus, and that is the version that about 100 of us heard last night, at WNYC’s Greene Space down on Varick Street, with the New York Virtuoso Singers led by Harold Rosenbaum. read more
As I write this, it’s 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, October 8, and I’m listening to WNYC radio host Terrance McKnight count down the last 30 minutes before New York City’s all-classical WQXR becomes part of the WNYC public radio family. The change to a new radio frequency is being celebrated with a live broadcast of the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra’s Carnegie Hall concert, which features Stravinsky’s “Dumbarton Oaks,” Webern’s Fuga from Bach’s Musical Offering, the Beethoven Violin Concerto, and the world premiere of Aaron Jay Kernis’s Concerto with Echoes. In a few minutes I will move my Bose radio pre-sets so that there is a reserved spot at 105.9 instead of 96.3, and here’s hoping the signal makes it over the airwaves to where I live. The is the main worry that traditional radio listeners may have about the change, other than duplication of radio hosts and programs during the hours when both WNYC-FM and WQXR hosted all-classical programs. (You can view a WQXR program schedule at the WNYC website and a bunch of other FAQs about the switch can be found at here.)
Terrance McKnight sounds pretty happy and proud of the fact that an all-classical station has been preserved in any form in the city of New York. read more
On Saturday night, I headed to Carnegie Hall to see Trey Anastasio, lead singer and guitarist of Phish, perform with the New York Philharmonic. But that—more on that later—was a sort of a tangent to the orchestra’s main event, which occurs four nights later. The Philharmonic’s opening-night gala will be on September 16, when they play for the first time with Alan Gilbert officially at the helm as music director—a starry affair with Renee Fleming, who will sing Messiaen’s Poèmes pour Mì. on a concert that also includes a EXPO, a premiere by composer-in-residence Magnus Lindberg, and Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique.
It’s customary for orchestras to welcome new music directors with a fair amount of hoopla. Gilbert is no exception, and it doesn’t hurt that he’s young and doesn’t mind digging into the full spectrum of duties required by the modern-day music director of a symphony orchestra. Gilbert also has an especially strong connection to the Philharmonic; he grew up in the city, and his parents have both been violinists in the orchestra (his father retired in 2001, and his mother, Yoko Takebe, still plays in the Phil). The orchestra’s first international tour under Gilbert will be to Asia this October—a nice connection for Gilbert, since his mother is Japanese.
Wednesday night at the Philharmonic will be the kind of event that’s impossible to avoid if you have even the slightest interest in the arts. A certain number of exalted New Yorkers will attend the concert in person, of course, but you’ll also be able to watch it on TV on Live from Lincoln Center, and which will be simulcast on the soon-to-be-late-lamented WXQR radio (whose programming will move to WNYC at FM 105.9 on October 8, the same day the Philharmonic departs for Asia). For those that miss the Wednesday the 16th broadcast, this concert will also air for SundayArts September 20th at noon. read more
Danielle de Niese is back in her hometown of New York this month for her New York recital debut at Carnegie Hall on February 27. This comes directly on the heels of a run of performances at the Met as Euridice in Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice opposite Stephanie Blythe’s Orfeo, for which Blythe and de Niese received excellent reviews, including from Anthony Tommasini in The New York Times and Martin Bernheimer in The Financial Times. At twenty-nine, the American soprano—of Sri Lankan and Dutch heritage, born in Australia—has reached the opera world’s A-list at a much earlier age than most contemporary opera singers.
She recently spoke about Handel and Mozart—two of her her favorite composers—what it has been like growing up in the public eye, her U.S. recital tour this month, performing for a camera versus for a live audience, and why she thinks she’ll have to be dragged off the stage when she’s 80 years old.
Jennifer Melick: Congratulations on your performances in the Met’s Orfeo ed Euridice this winter. I caught it twice—live at the Met’s January 14 performance—that turned out to be the night Stephanie Blythe was ill and did not sing. So I came back for the Saturday HD movie-theater broadcast on January 24.
Danielle De Niese: I haven’t had a chance to hear the broadcast yet, but I’ve heard from people about it.
Melick: What sort of feedback have you gotten?
De Niese: Amazing feedback. I’ve gotten loads of messages on my website, and my friends who went to the movie theaters all over the world, in Japan, they totally loved it. read more
If you’ve ever parented, taught, or observed children aged seven, eight, or nine years old, you know that they need to be doing stuff to learn, not just sitting listening.
This was something I observed when I went to see a professional/educational collaboration of Dido and Aeneas last spring at LaGuardia School of Music, Art, and the Performing Arts. On November 19, I joined several hundred first- and second-graders from New York City public schools who were attending one of six concerts taking place over three days at Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall. The concerts were part of the Weill Music Institute at Carnegie Hall’s educational program called “My City, My Song,” a theme meant to evoke a musical expedition through New York City and featuring musicians from Queens (Irish vocalist Anne-Marie Hildebrandt, piano/bodhrán), Harlem (gospel/opera baritone Gregory Rahming), and Manhattan’s Little India (Indian vocalist Falu, joined by vocalist Gaurav Shah, harmonium player Borahm Lee, and tablas player Satyan Shah).
For the most part, this one-hour program had the kids singing, clapping, and moving the whole time, beginning with the program introduction, a spirited call-and-response “I say a boom, chicka boom” with a group leader. read more
I’ve been watching the San Francisco Symphony’s Carnegie Hall opening-night celebration of Leonard Bernstein’s 90th birthday year on Great Performances. Fittingly, there’s a little bit of everything Lenny here, early and late, Broadway, symphonic, dance, opera, song cycle—symphonic dances from West Side Story, “What a Movie” from Trouble in Tahiti (with Dawn Upshaw), “I Can Cook Too” (Christine Ebersole, pictured), and Meditation No. 1 from Mass (cellist Yo-Yo Ma). Everyone is clearly having a great time, and when conductor Michael Tilson Thomas joins in singing during “Ya Got Me” from On the Town, it works perfectly, like something Lenny himself might have done. It seems appropriate for a Lenny celebration that there are “high-art” singers like Upshaw and Thomas Hampson, kids from the Juilliard School, and Ebersole representing Broadway: Lenny straddled some of the traditional boundaries between the classical and popular-music worlds, tackling composing, conducting, and educating with equal fervor.
The concert is part of the city’s months-long Lenny celebration, The Best of All Possible Worlds. And I think Lenny would have approved. read more
It’s October, the presidential campaigns have been going on what seems like forever, the stock market’s still in some sort of atrial fibrillation, and the banks are possibly in worse shape than we had thought even two weeks ago.
I’ve had enough. So as a public service, I would like to nominate David Daniels for president. Okay, not for president of the UNITED STATES. But I’d certainly call him the presumptive nominee in the countertenor category of vocal excellence. I’ve been listening to his latest CD of Bach cantatas and arias, with the English Concert led by Harry Bicket, and I’m happy to say it ranks right up there with Bach recordings of the late Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, high praise indeed. read more
Composer David Lang, one of the co-founders of New York’s Bang on a Can, has been a prolific presence on the city’s contemporary music scene for more than twenty years. But even he admits that it came as something of a surprise when he was announced as the recipient of this year’s Pulitzer Prize in Music for his work The Little Match Girl Passion (click here to hear the work on Carnegie Hall’s website), a heartbreakingly humble “opera” scored for just four voices and percussion. Lang sat down for an chat about the inception of the Hans Christian Andersen-inspired piece shortly after the Pulitzer announcement.
Download the interview as a podcast here, or listen to it as streaming audio after the jump. read more
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