Thanks to my neighbor, Elonna, who has been volunteering at the Seattle Opera this year and then offering me a ticket to the dress rehearsals of the operas, I got to see Richard Strauss' Ariadne auf Naxos on Tuesday. (This was after a brain-meltingly brutal day at work when I had to work a little later than usual, and I had put the opera outing on ( Read more... )

Jean Sibelius was born 150 years ago, and the Seattle Symphony celebrated with a series of concerts they called "Luminous Landscapes" in which they performed all of his symphonies, the violin concerto, the tone poem "Finlandia", and three chamber works. I believe there was other music of his performed as well, including some of his lieder after the ( Read more... )

Another note for future reference: Tom Service's list of "The 10 best operas by women". I've only seen one of these: Kaija Saariaho's L'amour de loin, which I've watched on DVD and found completely transporting. I've heard of Unsik Chin's Alice in Wonderland, but other than that these are all new names and titles to me.

Somebody named Will Robin has put together a program called Symphomania for WQXR, and it's comprised of 24 hours of 21st Century orchestral music. Robin's introduction gives context for the program, which includes a number of composers and pieces of music that I've heard or at least heard of, but also many composers I've never heard of. I'm mostly ( Read more... )

'I had the same reaction when I heard this album 18 years ago. It made 17 year old me want to go fuck shit up and burn it all down. It makes 34 year old me want to go fuck shit up and burn it all down in a sensible minivan.' (Jessica, in a comment on Anna Minard's belated review of Sleater-Kinney's Dig Me Out)

'Anniversarising can be the most obvious yet most scattergun approach to programming in classical music, but all those round numbers ought to give programmers the excuse and audiences the chance to programme less familiar music as well as the symphonic Scandiwegians. So in 2015 let’s hear it for Aulis Sallinen (80) and Frank Zappa (who would have ( Read more... )

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My neighbor dragged me to the Michael Franti show at Marymoor Park yesterday. I didn't really want to go, but she bought me a ticket, so what could I do? Well, it turns out that I could have great time ( Read more... )

Ludovic Morlot is in his third year as the music director of the Seattle Symphony Orchestra, and in that short time he has created an aura of innovation and exploration around the SSO. Partly this has been through trying to expand the repertoire that they perform, especially in 20th Century music and in commissioned pieces such as John Luther Adams ( Read more... )

Suddenly I'm listening to a whole bunch of music on YouTube. This has been threatening to happen for a while now, as my appetite for new music has outgrown my budget. The trigger seems to have been delving into John Luther Adams, who won the Pulitzer Prize this year for a piece called "Become Ocean" that was commissioned and premiered by the ( Read more... )