Category: Playlist

Title Image Lori Eanes The composer, performer, and media artist Pamela Z works with a wide variety of techniques, including “voice, live electronic processing, sampled sound, and video,” and has produced art both for the concert hall and the museum. From San Francisco, she sent us this playlist. Each track here contains a multiplicity of […]

Gay Anthems and Arias Title Image JAN WINDSZUS PHOTOGRAPHY · Date 01/12/2016 Often, music from childhood and youth doesn’t merely bring back memories of those times: it evokes real, physical sensations like adrenaline, sweat, and heartbreak. For this playlist, Barrie Kosky, the Artistic Director of the Komische Oper Berlin, mined his experiences as a gay […]

Sounds of Lava and Luminosity Title Image Hartmut Welscher · Date 11/24/2016 Backstage at the Harpa Concert Hall in Reykjavik, a mens’ choir is rehearsing. It’s their 100th anniversary, and a group of craggy old men in suits are talking to Víkingur Ólafsson like he’s a favored son-in-law, back for one of his many regular […]

Impermanence and Intervals Title Image © PETER SERLING · Date 11/17/2016 One way the Bang on a Can All-Stars describe themselves is as “a genre in their own right.” On their upcoming European tour, with performances at the Kampnagel in Hamburg (November 18), Les Halles de Schaerbeek in Brussels (November 19), and Villa Musica in […]

The Music of Failed Campaigns By · Date 11/3/2016 Yesterday, the BBC posted a surprisingly tame piece with Donald Trump’s thoughts on music; in it was an admiring reference to Steve Reich’s phase technique. (I first found out about it through a tweet by William Robin.) As others have pointed out, Trump himself probably didn’t […]

Interconnectedness and Nature Title Image Jan Asselijn (circa 1600/1616–1652) [PD] · Date 10/13/2016 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 […]

Shapes and Sounds Title Image KAAPO KAMU · Date 07/28/2016 “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; […]

Voices of the Past and Present Title Image © Werner Buechler · Date 07/21/2016 “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 […]

While awaiting his execution by firing squad, the painter Cavaradossi sings, “I die in despair, and never before have I loved life so much!” It’s an aria of reverie, lament, and implicit protest against his captors. In this opera, Puccini’s “Tosca” (1900), power and evil aren’t abstractions: the chief of secret police has arrested and […]

Categories of Music and Darkness Photography Caroline Savage · Date 03/03/2016 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. […]