Beginning with Stockhausen on April 6, “20th Century Radicals” is a new 40-part series about the composers who shaped the previous century. Over the course of 40 weekly episodes, it covers Andriessen and Berio through to Xenakis and La Monte Young, via El-Dabh, Jolas, Murail and Takahashi, and many more. It’s the sort of series […]
Category: Interview
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Between Beauty and Lies
Frederick Reece’s forthcoming first book, Forgery in Musical Composition: Aesthetics, History, and the Canon, is a feast of a read, offering far more than a history of fakery in classical music. It asks: How was the canon formed and when did we begin to care about authenticity in art? Can lies be beautiful? What is […]
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Unnatural Invisibility
Some composers are celebrated in their lifetimes. Others must wait for history to catch up. A composer faces a plethora of challenges throughout their career, from testing an edgy yet dubious idea or missing a crucial post-concert networking opportunity to simply submitting compositions on time. The odds of slipping into obscurity are extremely high. Add […]
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Seeking Leverage
The UK-based Musicians’ Union has 36,000 members, and covers musicians across a huge variety of genres, vocations and working patterns. Its orchestral section—about 10% of the membership—represents the best organized part of the union. (Salaried orchestras like the Hallé or the Liverpool Philharmonic—with playing roles and organizational structures that have rarely changed in decades—are extremely […]
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Useful Music
Composer, conductor and facilitator Michael Betteridge’s music sometimes moves like the ocean. In his reworking of Vaughan Williams’ one-act opera, “Riders to the Sea,” he stripped the orchestration to its emotional essence, replacing rich string textures with oboe, accordion, and bass clarinet. His new prologue was bold and theatrical as Bartley, silhouetted against a sea […]
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The Space of Beauty
The premiere of Klaus Lang’s “tönendes licht” did not take place quite as anticipated. Composed for organ and spatially distributed orchestra, the work was due to be performed at St. Stephen’s cathedral, Vienna, in November 2020. In the end, due to ongoing restrictions brought on by the pandemic, the four sections of the orchestra, spread […]
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For an Idea
The Russian invasion of Ukraine forced the music world to reckon urgently with its naïveté towards the country’s imperial ambitions. Looking back, it remains shocking just how willing the field was to ignore, for instance, Valery Gergiev’s aggressive pro-Kremlin propaganda. The violinist Lisa Batiashvili, in contrast, was prophetically clearsighted, and willing to take action, too. […]
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“You Have to Be Relentless”
To look at his schedule or to watch him huff, stomp and jab with his hands—without a baton, always—at the podium, Antonio Pappano would seem to be one of the hardest-working conductors in the classical music business. For much of the past two decades, he has led Italy’s finest symphony orchestra, the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale […]
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Switch Sounds Upside Down
Ron Carter is one of the titanic bassists in the history of jazz. Raised in Detroit, he started playing the cello, then added the bass, training as a classical musician at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, and then the Manhattan School of Music. While still studying, he started playing jazz in […]
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Human Tension
Peter Sellars is one of today’s most innovative theater and opera directors. From his daring early work, including a famous / infamous Mozart-Da Ponte trilogy, which included a “Don Giovanni” set in East Harlem and a “Nozze di Figaro” in Trump Tower, to his groundbreaking Salzburg production of Messiaen’s “Saint François d’Assise” and through to […]