RETRO: Germany's zeitkratzer Transcribe, Transform Lou Reed's 'Metal Machine Music' >>
It only makes sense that the land that brought us both Bach and Beethoven and Holger Czukay and Irmin Schmidt would be the first to even think about transcribing Lou Reed’s 1975 hocus pocus opus.
RETRO: John Fitz Rogers, 'Transit' feat. Michael Nicollela (Gale Recordings) >>
Upon a cursory listening only, composer and decorated University of South Carolina professor John Fitz Rogers' Gale Recordings release Transit seems to owe more to Emerson, Lake and Palmer than Varèse, Ligeti or Nancarrow. Nonetheless, after acquiring the composer's score, through-composed to near fault, it's quite obvious that Transit, as a completely notated work of art, does indeed exist in a state of impassioned, yet precise flux.
REVIEW: Drilling A Hole Through The Sky: 30 Years Of The Haters >>
(Format 23,5x16 cm.) Armed with a large drill-bit, GX Jupitter-Larsen hurls himself from 3,000 meters. During descent, he drills a hole in the sky as literal as only he could -- ∆G all along the "polywave." And thus the title of this handsomely packaged, shoddily reproduced grimoire from John Wiese's Helicopter imprint.
RETRO: "Zero Tolerance for Silence (Part 1)" by Pat Metheny >>
Let's face it, protest songs are a dime a dozen. Be it Britain or Iraq, Roe vs. Wade, black power or white guilt, nearly everyone's got an axe to grind.
Bison-tennial Man: A John Lurie Print >>
The first piece of art I purchased purely for art's sake was a facsimile (edition of 45) of John Lurie's magnificently stroked 'Bison.' A 21x30 inkjet print on archival rag paper, it's signed by John, too.
The Che Guevara of Copyright: Johannes Kreidler's 'Product Placements' >>
When Brahms did it, it was art. When Negativland did it, it was funny. (And when 2 Live Crew did it to Roy Orbison, in a way, it was artfully funny.) But when Girl Talk's Gregg Gillis plunders the entirety of recorded popular music and emerges with the perfect riff x to complement just the right lick y, somehow it's a borderline illegal calculus.
Carnegie Hall @ 125: Link Up Curriculum's 'The Orchestra Rocks' >>
It's the same old story almost every day. Yet another think piece on the fate of, quote, "classical music." More often than not, it is a cautionary tale: Symphony x cannot pay the rent, its endowment has run dry; opera company y can't put patrons in seats, the audience is dying. Looking purely at financials, it might be tempting to think said woe is warranted. It's not, of course. The ledger has never offered the best forecast for any state, classical music included. Outreach, support, engagement--the three pillars of music education at large--continue to be much more accurate bellwethers. Pedagogically speaking, then, no other institution offers a more far-reaching, supportive and uniquely hands-on approach than the Link Up curriculum designed by Carnegie Hall.
Carnegie Hall @ 125: Weill Institute's Lullaby Project >>
Commissioned for the birth of Bertha Faber's second son, with Clara Schumann at the piano, Brahms' "Lullaby" was first heard some 150 years ago. Absent that night in Vienna, you'll still recall its gentle, E-flat waltz from your own childhood. Likewise, you weren't there last April for the world premiere of "Sweet Like Honey Buns." But that's just because its funky, electric guitar-led hook, care of composer Daniel Levy and a young mother named Vetaya, was first performed at Rikers Island. The end result of Carnegie Hall's Lullaby Project, songs like "Honey Buns," LaToria's "Mommy's Boys, Mommy's Blessing" and "Sleep Under the Willow" by Sarah (institutions like prisons and hospitals prefer first names only) are all part of a precious process, intent on helping at-risk women, and often their partners, bond with their babies.
PREMIERE: Listen to wild Up feat. Jodie Landau's "as I wait for the lion" (Bedroom Community) >>
Premiering here on Classicalite, by their numbers anyways, you'll hear a mix as open and as carefree as Highway 101. Whereas, simultaneously, as intimate, as huddled as the mass of hybrids piled bumper-to-bumper on the 110. Settle in, then, as wild Up founder Christopher Rountree leads the shimmering, beguiling "as I wait for the lion," the eighth track off of you of all things, out today from Valgeir Sigurðsson's Bedroom Community.
PREMIERE: Watch Adam Sliwinski Play Dan Trueman's "Marbles" Étude on bitKlavier (New Amsterdam) >>
It's been 11 whole months, yes, since we first saw Sō Percussion's Adam Sliwinski's cross-handed study of Dan Trueman's bitKlavier. Shot then by Troy Herion, with Silwinski patched into his Princeton colleague's "prepared digital piano" via Casio USB for prelude-only, with all the bugs beta-ed out now, watch Silwinski's Roland A-88 shake under the more progressive hammer action of "Marbles"--directed by Evan Chapman. Like Ligeti's last Grawemeyer étude for Boulez from Book One, but played by the Synclavier I from Boulez conducts Zappa, lest you think Dan Trueman's lost his own here, well, just press play.
PREMIERE: Watch Nigel Kennedy's Updated Summer of Vivaldi (Sony Classical) >>
Here in the dog days of summer, two and a half decades removed from his record-selling album of Vivaldi's 'The Four Seasons' (EMI), Classicalite premieres the first video for violinist Nigel Kennedy's exciting new "rewrite" on Sony.
Meet the Mostly Mozart Fest Orchestra: Vote Tanya, Jon, Tom or Lawrence! >>
Mostly Mozart concerts have been a summer staple in participating cities since 1966. Indeed, an historically informed opportunity for the world's foremost interpreters of the pure classical canon, alongside top-flight works by today's contemporary voices. Having plucked out our favorite string players earlier, here, then, are Classicalite's five favorite wind ones: flutist Tanya Dusevic Witek, principal clarinet Jon Manasse, bassoonist Tom Sefčovič and principal horn player Lawrence DiBello...
Meet the Mostly Mozart Fest Orchestra: Vote Laura, Shmuel, Alvin or Lou! >>
As the name implies, the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra is the resident ensemble of Lincoln Center's Mostly Mozart Festival. Thee premiere orchestra here in the States dedicated to performing the works of (mostly) the classical era, not surprisingly, it's composed of musicians local (New York Phil, Met Opera, Orpheus Chamber), national (Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, St. Paul Chamber) and certainly worldwide acclaim. Vote for your favorite MMFO string player--Laura, Shmuel, Alvin or Lou--below.
EXCLUSIVE: Classicalite Q&A with Andrea Bocelli >>
Wagner had Bayreuth in northern Bavaria. Years later, Pierre Boulez would get his IRCAM under the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. And on Thursday, July 27, 2006, on the outskirts of a frazione in the province of Pisa, finally, a lawyer-cum-tenor from nearby Lajatico christened his own grand edificio d'arte: Andrea Bocelli's Teatro del Silenzio.
PREMIERE: Superhuman Happiness Cover "Long Black Veil" for 'Wall to Wall Johnny Cash' at Symphony Space >>
We've heard a lot of takes on Danny Dill and Marijohn Wilkin's 1959 quasi-murder ballad "Long Black Veil." True, while not every rendition hence faithfully exonerated Lefty Frizzell's original--itself deliberately more Nashville countrypolitan than Texan honky tonk--there have been fewer still that still stand on their own. For every versatile Burl Ives, The Band's big, pink one or even Diamanda Galás' most, um, unidiomatic reading, there are too many uninspired dronings on from the likes of The Proclaimers, Bruce Hornsby, Daves both Matthews and Gray and, yes, Marianne Faithfull.
