Category: Blog

  • Celebrating Uncommon Instrument Awareness Day

    Celebrating Uncommon Instrument Awareness Day

    July 31st was Uncommon Instrument Awareness Day. Yep, that’s a holiday. It’s a moment to reflect on the world’s rare, odd and truly extraordinary instruments. In a video that I produced for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, I look at 10 curious inventions that you may hear at its concerts one time or another. They range…

  • How the 1918 Flu Pandemic Shaped Classical Music

    How the 1918 Flu Pandemic Shaped Classical Music

    In the June 2020 issue of BBC Music Magazine I look at various ways in which composers were impacted by the flu epidemic of 1918-20. The virus, which wreaked havoc for nearly three years and left at least 50 million people dead including about 675,000 in the U.S., impacted music in ways both significant and…

  • Conrad Tao Performs Rzewski’s Epic Protest Work

    Conrad Tao Performs Rzewski’s Epic Protest Work

    Live from his New York City apartment, the pianist Conrad Tao on March 25 performed The People United Will Never Be Defeated, Frederic Rzewski’s epic set of 36 variations on the 1973 Chilean protest song.

  • Louis Langrée on Beethoven’s Mega-Concert

    Louis Langrée on Beethoven’s Mega-Concert

    Concerts were longer in the time of Beethoven, as were attention spans. But even by those standards, the storied program he organized for Vienna’s Theater an der Wien on Dec. 22, 1808 was over the top. Called the Akademie, it ran from 6:30 to 10:30 pm in two parts and included the premieres of the…

  • Oscars 2020: Year of The Cello

    Oscars 2020: Year of The Cello

    In listening to several scores to films nominated for Academy Awards in 2020, a particular feature emerges: a prominent cello theme. The instrument has been called on to convey a range of moods and even shaped the plot of at least one film.

  • Julia Wolfe on Evoking the ’60s in ‘Flower Power’

    Julia Wolfe on Evoking the ’60s in ‘Flower Power’

    For all of the iconic protest music that came out of the 1960s and early ’70s, classical composers mostly stayed at a remove from that decade’s turbulent events. There were a handful of noted exceptions, of course, including Terry Riley, La Monte Young, George Crumb and Karlheinz Stockhausen, but their works were not exactly staples…

  • The Crown Season 3 Soundtrack Features Beethoven, Chopin

    The Crown Season 3 Soundtrack Features Beethoven, Chopin

    In the third season of the Netflix series “The Crown,” the story spans the mid-1960s to the late ’70s, a period that allows producers to draw on a rich array of popular music. American songbook standards give way to rock anthems by the Kinks, the Four Seasons, Deep Purple, the Who and David Bowie, among…

  • Philip Glass Finds Orchestral Converts

    Philip Glass Finds Orchestral Converts

    The New York Philharmonic recently opened its fall season with the King Lear Overture, its first commissioned score by Philip Glass. Music director Jaap van Zweden was a driving force behind the premiere. “I felt strongly that this was a symphonic composer that needed more attention from our orchestra,” the Dutch conductor told me in…

  • Shostakovich Is Having a Moment and This Conductor Is On It

    Shostakovich Is Having a Moment and This Conductor Is On It

    In scanning the calendars of symphony orchestras this season, you may notice that Shostakovich is having a moment. The conductor Karina Canellakis considers the composer’s present-day relevance.

  • Angel Blue Preps for Porgy and Bess at The Met

    Angel Blue Preps for Porgy and Bess at The Met

    The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess is returning to the Metropolitan Opera for the first time in 34 years, with the soprano Angel Blue and the bass-baritone Eric Owens in the title roles. In a bit of luxury casting, they’ll be joined by Ryan Speedo Green, Latonia Moore and Denyce Graves, among several other noted singers.…