I should explain at the outset here that I do believe God exists, and I am not using this to denounce any church or religion, or any religious icons, nor do I want to upset people that don’t have that belief. At the same time, I do feel that there are times where I can understand the point of view of both the faithful and the skeptical and I end up somewhere on the fence (What is that exactly? A half-conscientious observer of religion of some sort?), so hopefully this explains where I am approaching this from. And I also want to keep this squarely focused on classical music, not going anywhere near any gospel or Christian music or any genre tied in with those.
For the record, it should be noted that I was raised a Catholic and attended Sunday masses every week up until I was in high school. I was even in the church folk group for a time. Not really sure when it grew apart from me or why. Read the rest of this entry »
Folks, just wanted to inform you that my laptop died on Christmas Eve. It was a Dell and it was a hand-me-down, so, perhaps it was time anyway, but not sure if this is a permanently-dead computer yet. The thing had been alerting me for a while that it had a corrupt disc, so after a whole bunch of disk checks, security checks, cleanups and deletions the thing was still acting up. It ceased to function in a proper manner in the early morning hours of Christmas Day, so, I just wanted to inform you guys, the readers, that the content will probably not be everyday, but it wasn’t everyday anyway. I still hope to continue to publish some new material on here on the site, so, please just know I am not going anywhere. But in any event, I hope everybody has a wonderful holiday and I will be on again soon. Happy New Year to you all!
This is sort of a Christmas gift for me, but it is now one I can give to you guys!
Sonja Gustafson is a singer from London, ON, Canada that you may or may not know from a little-known documentary TV series titled “Bathroom Divas: So You Want To Be an Opera Star” that aired on Bravo Canada (It aired here in the US on Ovation TV). On that show she was one of five finalists that were chosen from a large number of applicants that auditioned. The show itself was focused on the finalists and the work that went into training and nuturing their vocal skills for operatic performance, and the winner got to sing an aria with a symphony orchestra (She came in second place, but did really well). Sonja Gustafson had started as a classically trained vocalist (The program showcased her giving an operatic career a second shot after initially abandoning it), but ultimately decided to try her hand at jazz with some fellow musicians, performed locally in her hometown, and made a jazz CD as her debut recording, as well as a follow-up, her holiday release Comfort & Joy. Before we got into any of that, Sonja, currently a happily-married mother of two (She had her one-month old with her during our Skype conversation) talked about the origin of her music career. Read the rest of this entry »
Cincinnati-based composer Douglas Knehans may have come into the music game late in life (He wouldn’t be the only one as we’ve seen so far), but he has had quite a bit of experience thus far and is making the kind of music that media sources like The Washington Post and Miami Herald have been praising. Besides composing he is also the Norman Dinerstein Professor of Composition Scholar at the University of Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music (My God, doesn’t that confuse people about his name??), and apparently he was once Jennifer Jolley‘s composition teacher (Hate that I forgot to ask him about working with her). Douglas’s last full CD of compositions titled Fractured Traces and the Pridonoff Duo’s current disc Virtuosity Squared (featuring Douglas’ piece titled Cascade) are both available on Ablaze, a label devoted to new and existing works by living composers.
Douglas had some time to speak to me.
CM: Can you take us back to your beginnings?
DK: I always wanted to be a composer, but I guess I felt I didn’t want to just be a paper composer, that I wanted to learn how to play an instrument and make music, therefore it was a little circuitous. I came to music late. I was in my last year of high school before I took up an instrument or learned to read music or anything like that. And then went straight from that into college-level music, and that was pretty scary because I was a little bit deficient in terms of my background–I had no music training in my childhood or anything like that. So, a lot of those undergraduate years were about just catching up and learning repertoire. But I also took lessons in composition at the same time that I took flute lessons and all the harmony and counterpoint stuff. I did kind of a double major then. Read the rest of this entry »
This being the end of the year, and the fact that this is a music-oriented blog where I’ve been keeping up (or trying to keep up with) the artists and relevant releases, I have to confess that I don’t really have the extensive lists that people have been posting on their respective pages. BUT I do like these a lot, and having listened to them all the way through as one should (I listen a few times before I write about them), I can safely say they are worthy of inclusion for any kind of year-end best releases list.
A big reason for the short list is simply because I’m unemployed and don’t have the money to purchase CDs like I used to. There have been a few opportunities to hear some great recordings that I will definitely list on here as my favorites for the year, but it just won’t be a Top 50 or Top 25.
And even though it’s comprised mostly of classical/new music, I’ve decided the addition of Mark Mandeville and This Frontier Needs Heroes (both being indie folk recordings) is not so crazy given that lots of people have hip-hop and rock on their lists with the classical releases. Read the rest of this entry »
Remarkable Theater Brigade (also known as RTB) is a performing arts group that produces new music works of various disciplines: operas, ballets, musicals, as well as music-only projects like orchestral and electro-acoustic pieces, and is run by soprano/composer Monica Harte, and composer/musical director Christian McLeer, also the General and Artistic Directors, respectively. RTB had eventually started an annual production of an evening of 10-minute short operas titled Opera Shorts that I had the chance to see back in November of this year (For which I wrote a review), and I loved how they could do both comical and serious pieces in this format. I even met some of these great folks afterwards! Monica Harte had some time to chat with us about this yearly project. Read the rest of this entry »
German-Japanese pianist Alice Sara Ott is sort of a dark-horse among the classical stars (At least here in the US), but she does have a few things going that allow for her to get a bit more exposure. For starters, she was tapped to step in and replace Lang Lang for a concert at London’s Barbican with Daniel Harding and the LSO last year. The Guardian’s Tim Ashley describes it so sweetly:
“Liszt’s Concerto plays fast and loose with form, jettisoning traditional movements in favour of evolving thematic development. The soloist, replacing Lang Lang at short notice, was Alice Sara Ott, who gave the kind of gawp-inducing bravura performance of which legends are made. The heft of her playing contrasts with the elegance of her platform manner. Harding’s conducting was all monumentality and fire – it felt a bit superhuman, as Liszt always should”–Tim Ashley, The Guardian
This plus the lady performs barefoot with symphony orchestras! Now that’s a scoop!
She had some time to spare to talk to The Glass. Read the rest of this entry »
To celebrate the 241st Birthday of Ludwig van Beethoven, I decided to post a “What I Would Have Asked” for LVB. I must stress that these are just possible questions.
The “Ghost of LVB” mysteriously showed up for the John Cage question, but sadly I couldn’t get anything else out of him.
CM: Has anyone ever called you Lud for short?
CM: So, how’d you become interested in classical music?
CM: I take it you never popped in a mixtape of jams to sort of balance out your days composing…
CM: Okay, so, the 5th Symphony–Was that first movement really about death at one’s door?
CM: Do you like that they made a spray-can that plays the 5th Symphony?
CM: When you went deaf, what exactly caused that back then? Did you play into your amp too much?
CM: So there’s this guy John Cage that has been telling people “Beethoven was wrong!”–What would you say to him if you could now?
(Ghost of LVB: I already soundly thrashed him for talking smack about me.)
CM: So, did you write the 9th Symphony as a longer piece because people hated you for making symphonies longer than Mozart’s?
Amy X Neuburg/Cory Smythe
Roulette
Brooklyn, NY
Dec. 13, 2011
It’s East Meets West…coast, that is.
On the stage of the old-school charming Roulette in Brooklyn was yet another creatively edgy program, put on this time by the pairing of West-coast avant-cabaret artist Amy X Neuburg and New York’s own pianist-composer, ICE’s Cory Smythe. Presented without an intermission, the show was almost entirely electronic or electro-acoustic in nature (with the exception of a refreshing burst of Fats Waller’s “Handful of Keys” from Mr. Smythe), and most of the pieces were composed and/or arranged by both of them. Read the rest of this entry »
Vicky Chow, a pianist who is well known as a member of the Bang On a Can All-Stars, is another great example of the hard-working, highly active new music community laden with creative artists and composers. Along with the All-Stars, Vicky has also been performing solo concerts regularly featuring the works of various modern and living composers, is one of the founding members of a Bang On a Can offshoot–the trio Typical Music, and is also the curator of a series of new music concerts held at the Gershwin Hotel called Contagious Sounds (which, by the way, she also participates in). In the coming year, Vicky will be releasing 2 new CDs: the new Bang On a Can All-Stars double CD to be released in February, and her second solo CD. She had a small break in her activities to chat with me about her work and her career. Read the rest of this entry »
The Glass is an online webpage for giving people an opportunity to see the arts world both through my words and the words of the artists themselves. On this page I hope to also give the cross-section of audiences an opportunity to read up on artists they possibly haven’t discovered ... Continue reading »
It was a Dell and it was a hand-me-down, so, perhaps it was time anyway, but not sure if this is a permanently-dead computer yet. The thing had been alerting me for a while that it had a corrupt disc, so after a whole bunch of disk checks, security checks, cleanups and deletions the thing was still acting up. It ceased to function in a proper manner in the early morning hours of Christmas Day, so, I just wanted to inform you guys, the readers, that the content will probably not be everyday, but it wasn’t everyday anyway. I still hope to continue to publish some new material on here on the site, so, please just know I am not going anywhere. But in any event, I hope everybody has a wonderful holiday and I will be on again soon. Happy New Year to you all! 
