Launched at Glasgow’s Glad Cafe in the weeks just before the first lockdown back in March 2020, Over/At has grown to become more than just a concert series. It’s now more like a “trans music-making world,” to quote the project website, encompassing record releases, published sheet music, and new commissions. Supported by the Sound and […]
Tag: New(ish) Music
Posted inInterview
Endorphin Rush
Looking back at Tamara Stefanovich’s September schedule, you see a multifaceted artist at work: She played Stravinsky twice with an all-star lineup at Musikfest Berlin, gave a duo recital with Pierre-Laurent Aimard in Amsterdam, and a solo recital in Regensburg, Germany, with a program of seldom-heard works by Scriabin, Roslavets, and Szymanowski. She also played […]
Posted inInterview
Death as a Metaphor
Missy Mazzoli is sitting in one of Ingmar Bergman’s bedrooms when she joins our Zoom meeting earlier this summer. At the time, the 40-year-old composer was finishing a monthlong artist’s residency at the Bergman Estate at Fårö—an island in the Baltic Sea off the coast of Sweden where the director lived and filmed parts of […]
Posted inPlaylist
A Palestinian Composers Playlist
“You come out of all this with a clear, sharp feeling that you are a stranger in all of this. Your real homeland is in exile,” composer Wisam Gibran says in Nili Belkind’s new book, Music in Conflict: Palestine, Israel and the Politics of Aesthetic Production. “So you start to search for it—to create it—in […]
Posted inPlaylist
An Industry Playlist
When the composers Michael Gordon, David Lang, and Julia Wolfe put on an eclectic marathon concert of contemporary music in downtown Manhattan in May 1987—and decided to call it the Bang on a Can Festival—they might not have known it would become the powerhouse organization it is today. But they were young, scrappy, and hungry […]
Posted inInterview
Struggling with Time
In September, conductor and Alarm Will Sound artistic director Alan Pierson managed a bureaucratic feat of Olympian proportions: traveling, with COVID-19 restrictions in effect, from the United States to Germany. His essential business: conducting the rehearsals, premiere, and later performances of Hans Thomalla’s new opera “Dark Spring” at the Nationaltheater Mannheim. In early October, Pierson […]
Posted inEssay
Binky Listens
On a 2014 episode of the beloved Canadian-American kid’s show “Arthur,” everyone is getting into this really weird band—except for Binky. Known among his classmates for having refined musical taste and talent, Binky decides to listen to the band only after another character, Muffy, teasingly suggests that “it might be too sophisticated” for him. “Too […]
Posted inInterview
Uncanny Songs
Before she moved to London as a third-year undergraduate student less than a decade ago, Na’ama Zisser had never even been to the opera. This week sees the production of her very own, “Mamzer Bastard,” by London’s Royal Opera House at the Hackney Empire. Taking place within an orthodox Hasidic community and featuring Jewish cantorial […]
Posted inInterview
Degrees of Density
“99 percent of the day, we are in the thinking mode,” Peter Ablinger tells me across a table in the lobby of our hotel in Bergen. “And in opposition to that, if we decide now to be silent for a few seconds. Just…” His voice drifts off and he raises his eyebrows in anticipation. For […]
Posted inInterview
Climbing Mountains
Unsuk Chin’s new work “Chorós Chordón” will be premiered by the Berlin Philharmonic under Simon Rattle tomorrow, November 3. In advance of the concert, we spoke with her about Ligeti’s tough side, the Korean new music scene, and glamor in classical music. VAN: How do you deal with loneliness, self-doubt, and frustration in your work? […]