10 years ago, in an ill-tempered article for the Berliner Zeitung, a music critic coined the term “cuddle classical.” It referred to musicians whose PR strategies tended towards the sweet and approachable; alongside the violinist Hilary Hahn, he named Janine Jansen, Baiba Skride, Leonidas Kavakos, and (of course) Lang Lang. I think he got Hahn, […]
Category: Interview
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Hierarchy of the Moment
The conductor Elena Schwarz grew up in Lugano, Switzerland, with parents who were both doctors specialized in internal medicine. Her recently work has emphasized contemporary music: she performed Olga Neuwirth at The Lucerne Festival, and Brian Ferneyhough in 2013 in Berlin, among other composers and ensembles. When we spoke on Skype, she spoke English fluently, […]
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Nuance
Touring with Chris Thile. Singing Schubert with A Far Cry. Writing for the Kronos Quartet, Brooklyn Rider, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, and many others. For a while, it seemed I couldn’t turn around in the contemporary music sphere of the Internet without tripping over the name Gabriel Kahane. After seeing him perform in Boston with AFC, […]
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Recurring Themes
Maintaining an active career performing with major orchestras around the world, Canadian-American violinist Leila Josefowicz has managed to walk the line between the expected standard repertoires for violin and orchestra and more daring new works. As a testament to this, over the past year, Leila has performed Sergei Prokofiev’s “Violin Concerto No. 1” (1917), Alban […]
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Xylem
New York-based composer Katherine Balch has an extraordinary number of things going on in her head at any given time. She has recently completed a piece for a multimedia project by Michiko Theurer, inspired by Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, to be performed March 13, 2017, in Boulder, Colorado. Currently, Katie is working on two separate […]
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Nonfictional Music
Jennie Gottschalk is a composer and scholar currently residing in Boston. Gottschalk holds degrees from The Boston Conservatory and Northwestern University. Her teachers have included Larry Bell, Yakov Gubanov, Jay Alan Yim, Augusta Read Thomas, and Aaron Cassidy. Gottschalk’s new book “Experimental Music Since 1970” was recently published by Bloomsbury. Over the course of a […]
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Purifying Harmonies
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.) […]
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What Is Indie Classical?
“During my dissertation research, I felt a certain mournful nostalgia for the world that I was investigating,” writes William Robin in “A Scene Without A Name: Indie Classical and American New Music in the 21st Century.” Reading it, I was surprised to find myself emotional at times too—a testament to Robin’s writing, which is precise […]
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I Am The Wound
It took me a long time to even think about translating this interview. Helmut Lachenmann, the German master of a music often referred to as musique concrète instrumentale, a noisy, raw, gorgeous music, is almost as noted for his words as for his sounds. These words can seem inextricable from the language that he says […]
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Into The Sky
Dylan Mattingly co-artistically directs and plays cello in the New York-based ensemble Contemporaneous, and he has played a considerable number of instruments in countless other groups specializing in everything from folk to funk. Last year I attended the premiere of his “Seasickness and Being (in love)” at the LA Philharmonic, a work that poignantly captures […]