Hello SundayArts readers. I’m pleased to be your new blogger about classical music, and to be sharing this space with the esteemed writer from Symphony Magazine, Jennifer Melick.  A little about me: while yes I too am a freelance journalist, I’m mostly a composer.  So I’ll be bringing you things from that perspective, writing about [...]

France’s Lyon Opera Ballet returned to the Joyce after 15 years with a wonderful program of works by Merce Cunningham, William Forsythe, and Maguy Marin, which runs through Mar 14. Even though none of these works were New York premieres, it was enormously gratifying to see them all together. Beach Birds (Cunningham) and Duo (Forsythe) [...]

Lots of orchestras incorporate projected images of planets when they perform Holst’s The Planets, but not every orchestra’s hometown has jet propulsion labs and nearby rocket scientists as collaborators. So when I heard the Houston Symphony Orchestra was coming to Carnegie Hall on Thursday (Jan. 28) to play The Planets on January 28—with a new [...]

Last Sunday, going stir crazy on a nasty rainy day, I took (dragged) my son and a friend of my daughter’s out to hear a woodwind quintet called PUFF! at South Orange Performing Arts Center in NJ ($10–15). The ensemble, in residence at Juilliard (an participants in the upcoming Focus! Festival, details after the jump), [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Radio station WQXR has found a buyer. In the rough-seas economy we’re in, this news might qualify as a small miracle. On Tuesday afternoon came the announcement that 73-year-old all-classical radio station WQXR—owned by the financially-troubled New York Times—has been sold to public radio station WNYC. The plan is for WNYC to continue broadcasting in [...]

I’ve been kicking myself for having missed a number of music events in New York this spring featuring ETHEL, the New York-based amplified string quartet. They don’t do a huge number of gigs—like all working musicians they have packed schedules filled with other musical things, and don’t exclusively devote themselves to ETHEL-ing. So as it [...]

A modest stack of new Bach CDs has been piling up on my desk over the last several months—when you’re a Bach-lover it’s hard for this not to happen periodically. There are keyboard sonatas (David Fray), violin sonatas (David Grimal), The Art of Fugue (Pierre-Laurent Aimard), two- and three-part Inventions (Till Fellner), and even a [...]