On a cold Monday morning, the German composer Sarah Nemtsov met up with me in our Berlin office for an interview. Yesterday, Ricordi Berlin formally announced the three winners of its composition competition RicordiLab: Nemtsov, Shiori Usui, and Steffen Wick. (The advisory board consisted of Liza Lim, Kristjan Järvi, Gillian Moore, and Dr. Clemens Trautmann.) […]
Author Archives: VAN Magazine
Posted inPlaylist
A Hannu Lintu Playlist
Einojuhani Rautavaara “mastered almost every compositional style of the 20th century,” the Finnish conductor Hannu Lintu writes. Perhaps for that reason, he is often grouped with other European mavericks outside the serialist tradition, such as Arvo Pärt and Henryk Górecki. He is also an indispensable figure in Finnish music history. In October, Lintu will be […]
Posted inReview
They That Mourn
We took our shoes off in a foyer with wooden floors. In the center of the room was a communal jug of water, in which leaves were floating. Plain white paper lay nearby, so that we could fold it into cups and drink. I was at a performance of the “Human Requiem,” an immersive interpretation […]
Posted inInterview
The Yellow Suitcases
When the filmmaker Ingmar Bergman died, on July 30 2007, I was at the Universidad del Cine in Buenos Aires. It was a cold day, and strange: we had lost the director Michelangelo Antonioni, too. Some of my fellow students and I smoked cigarettes outside. I thought of the character of the Knight in Bergman’s […]
Posted inInterview
Awareness of the Present
Unseen Worlds, the label behind the new compilation of Carl Stone’s work, has a history of working with unusual composers and performers such as Laurie Spiegel, Philip Corner, Elodie Lauten, Girma Yifrashewa, and Lubomyr Melnyk, to name a few. I asked Tommy McCutchon a few questions about the label and working with Stone. VAN: Why […]
Posted inPlaylist
A Pekka Kuusisto Playlist
“Hi VANdals,” Pekka Kuusisto writes to us in the email with this playlist. The Finnish violinist, experimenter, and artistic director of the Meidän Festivaali (“Our Festival”) in Järvenpää, will visit his home country on tour with the Minnesota Orchestra this August, playing Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto; in September, he’ll be traveling to Germany with Ligeti’s Concerto, […]
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A Graham F. Valentine Playlist
“Your voice…is attracting the most discerning audiences.” In the 1994 film “Farinelli,” the actor and performer Graham F. Valentine looks down at the kneeling castrato, delivering faint praise in a nobleman’s reedy French. His normal speaking voice is a bass-baritone with a Scottish accent; he can also sing in a penetrating head voice. In this […]
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Design Review
For our series Design Review, we ask design professionals from outside the classical music industry to look at the visual side of things and give us their honest opinions. These comments resulted from a conversation between Laura Knoops and Hélène Mailloux last week, who looked at recently released CDs from 2015–2016. Tõnu Kõrvits: Mirror (ECM) […]
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A JACK Quartet Playlist
This playlist, by JACK Quartet cellist Kevin McFarland, emphasizes darkness—a fitting counterpoint to the group’s recent and upcoming concerts (on March 4 at San Francisco Performances) of Georg Friedrich Haas’ String Quartet No. 3, “In iij Noct.” Here is McFarland’s introduction to the compilation. “In putting together this playlist, I struggled with the seemingly infinite […]
Posted inPlaylist
An Olga Neuwirth Playlist
Malaria! – “Geld/Money” In the 1980s, I was a punk living in the Austrian countryside, and I couldn’t wait to trade alpine meadows for a big, rough city. This all-girl band from Berlin made provocative, social-political, tough-as-nails songs; they inspired me to be loud, and ironic, and stir things up in my uptight environment. Besides […]