Archive for May, 2009
Elizabeth Watts, Schubert Lieder
This disc has been perched high atop a massive pile for some time because I keep hearing amazing things about this young British soprano—that and I cannot seem to get enough of Schubert’s lieder these days. So finally, middle of the night, I decided to put on Schubert Lieder specifically to hear my insomniacal [...]
Fleisher’s Ravel
Do you ever have that experience where you go to a concert and hear a piece of music performed, and for days after that is the only music you can hear? I’m there now. I went to Alice Tully Hall the other night to hear pianist Xiayin Wang perform a piece by my [...]
More Thoughts on Tiempo Libre
When I first wrote about Tiempo Libre here, I thought it was a novel project for them, and thought their paean to J.S. Back came out of the fact that they were acting as a “backup band” for James Galway. It made sense: here was one of the great classical music performers of our [...]
Allow Me to be the Last…
…to heap some praise on the Cuban group Tiempo Libre! I’ve really been enjoying their new record Bach in Havana, as much as I did their record with super-flautist James Galway a few months back. Like Villa-Lobos before them (who wrote a whole series of pieces called Bachianas Brazilieras), they fuse music they [...]
Revelations and Amazements in the Key of C
I cannot believe that in the whirlwind of my week (where I had a huge concert in New York dedicated to my own music) I neglected to mention the absolutely profound experience I had at Carnegie Hall last week when Terry Riley and (a whole lot of) friends performed his seminal work In C. My [...]
“Phone Rings, Door Chimes, In comes…”
The sixties were of course an absolutely wild time of weird change and complex feeling. I missed it all (being born five days into the seventies), but in listening to Company I can only imagine. It must have been terrifying—Rock music, those high-volume gyrations of the Dionysian youth, was everywhere, including on Broadway, which was [...]