Nikita Pavlov Steve Reich’s 1988 composition “Different Trains” is immediately recognizable, even to those with just a passing interest in modern music. The piece has technical virtuosity, a melody intricately constructed using archival speech recordings, and indisputable aesthetic soundness. Beyond these virtues, one senses that deeply personal undertones inform the work. These include Reich’s peripatetic…
It goes without saying that Meira Warshauer’s “Tekeeyah (a call)” — a concerto for shofar — centers on religious themes. At the heart of the work is the pulsating call to repentance traditionally trumpeted through a ram’s horn on the High Holy Days. What’s less obvious is that Warshauer’s first symphony, the other major orchestral…
The virtually forgotten Lithuanian-Jewish composer Joseph Achron (1886-1943) is getting a premiere this weekend in the German city of Brandenburg an der Havel. As part of their season-long exploration of music suppressed by the Third Reich, the Brandenburg Symphoniker, conducted by Robin Engelen, will present the first German performance of Achron’s third violin concerto (and…
There have been New York premieres of several noteworthy works recently, including major new violin concertos by Harrison Birtwhistle and James McMillan. But easily the most interesting was the grand finale of Lincoln Center’s Tully Scope Festival on March 18: Heiner Goebbels’s “Songs of Wars I Have Seen,” which uses passages from the remarkable book…
One might be forgiven, upon first listening to the NAXOS recording of Avner Dorman’s concertos performed by Andrew Cyr’s Metropolis Ensemble, for not feeling immediately convinced that these are, in fact, concertos in any traditional sense. There are no buoyant Mozartian introductions here, no grand orchestral pauses to launch soloists into rapturously virtuosic cadenzas before…
For over half a century, Alexander Goehr has been one of England’s most important composers, an avant-garde musician whose varied (and often challenging) body of work has been championed by luminaries including Pierre Boulez, Simon Rattle, Daniel Barenboim and Jacqueline de Pré. Goehr’s manuscripts have recently been acquired by the music archive of Berlin’s Akademie…
After listening to and viewing a rehearsal for the New York Philharmonic Orchestra’s presentation of “In Seven Days,” the 2008 concerto for piano and moving image by Thomas Adès and Tal Rosner being performed January 7 and 8 at Avery Fisher Hall, I was ready to become a creationist. Not that the piece works to…
“Black woods howl in the stove/Our dog turned into a lion/but today the grownups are/Frowning like a mean witch.” So go the lyrics to Karel Berman’s song “Children at Play” from his 1944 work “Poupata” (Buds), sung by Canadian bass Robert Pomakov. Berman’s lyrics convey a naïve perspective but were composed for a bass on…
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