Kurt Gottschalk is a journalist and author based in New York City. His writings on contemporary and classical music, jazz and improvisation have been published in outlets throughout Europe and America and he has two volumes of short fiction to his name. He is also the producer and host of the Miniature Minotaurs radio programme on WFMU.
It would be rash to make assumptions about the composer/performer collective based on a single program, but it was still not to notice a divergence from the past in the program of world premieres.
The chamber ensemble offered a century-spanning programming, stretching from Béla Bartók and Ruth Crawford Seeger to Ann Cleare and Georg Friedrich Haas.
Horszowski gave Feldman’s Trio everything it needed – a tempo almost too slow to count, a delicacy in attack that left the space around the notes mostly empty, and a deep focus through shifting time signatures.
Listening to arrangements of Bach is like Dostoevsky’s challenge not to think about polar bears. It’s best to put the Bach out of your thoughts, even if “the cursed thing will come to mind every minute.”
The question isn’t if Van Parys and Schoeters did right by Poe so much as if they did right by Debussy. Poe will prevail. Debussy’s opera remains unfinished.
Director James Farrah and writer Raúl Santos' realization of Glass’ Fall of the House of Usher is a work of unbridled creativity, an engrossing film which might have benefited from a bridle.
The production has everything going for it: strong material and smooth web design make for a seamless and enjoyable presentation. But the sum of the parts don’t quite make a whole.
Haigh took full advantage of the Miller-Scott organ’s capacity for extraordinary delicacy and lower registers that can be profound yet crystal clear. La Nativité du Seigneur provided plenty of opportunity for displays of subtlety.
The camera was in near constant motion, scanning Rothenberg’s hands, her face, and the objects in the room, hovering Platonic forms, bottles and bowls and human figures yet to come into being.
The live-streamed production of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s The Threepenny Opera sought to reinvent for online presentation but ended up uneven and overly busy.
The Americanism in the compositions on the program was culled from American hymns, gospel and pre-jazz social music, with a highlight being the recently rediscovered work of Florence Price.
The strings stabbed, the camera panned in quick spurts with jump cuts, but the performers were still. It was an anxious and enormously effective approach to Rzewski’s prison meditation.
Building on 15 years of collaboration with the ensemble, Gilded Wings (for two clarinets and strings) revealed a new maturity in Fujikura's always enjoyable music.
