118 stories by "Jean Ballard Terepka"
Chen Yi's music is, in the best possible sense, powerful: it affirms. Musicians and audience alike, at the end of each piece, are strengthened in the continuing determination to do one's bes…
The Tallis Scholars' most recent turn in the Columbia University Miller Theatre Early Music Series was billed as "Heinrich Isaac at 500." This concert title wasn't quite accurate: the evenin…
Cohen then spoke; he presented the four-movement structure of the piece about to be performed. Although various passages in "Voyagers" evoked the diversity of music offerings on the Golden R…
Playing both traditional and modern instruments, usually amplified, all four musicians supplement and expand Ukrainian folk melodies and songs with rhythmic and stylistic adaptations as well…
Like most C4 concerts, this one had a theme: it was an evening of "songs about love " both for and against." Songs' ideas and purposes mirrored, echoed, anticipated and challenged each other…
The two soprano soloists were marvelous. Hélène Brunet combines supple lyricism with technical elegance. Clara Rottsolk's voice is at once silvery and earthy, delicate and powerful. In the…
Christen Lien is an exciting artist, playing innovative music for viola, combining formal and informal, classical and electronic elements. She brings an eclectic intelligence, alternately di…
Because the first three pieces of the program had established an intellectual across-time dialogue between Bach and Glass and an examination of Glass' Bach 'ancestry,' the unabashedly Romant…
Interestingly, some of the most raucously explicit material of protest came not from the Peace and Social Justice Concert 24 but from the Wil(helms/liams)burg Concert 26, a collaboration of …
n light-hearted Rationalize (concert 27), composer Cody Brookshire combined found and manipulated sounds created by the audience with live music on bass clarinet and marimba. Brookshire crea…
In spite of the Festival's lengthy booklet and daily concert updates, the rich creative vitality of the electroacoustic musical community remains only tangentially documented: composers and …
In the seven concerts of the second half of the 2017 New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival held this month at National Sawdust in Brooklyn, New York, the full diversity and eclectic v…
After fifteen years of formal study, Shyu incorporates five distinct music traditions in her newest work: "epic storytelling (Pansori), East Coast shaman music (DongHaeAhnByeolShinGut), and …
C4's last concert of the season was a typical C4 concert. The concert had one intermission; in both halves of the concert, there were one or two pieces that were new to C4 and one or two tha…
The artistic team responsible for this "Butterfly" made radical decisions and changes. Puccini's original three acts of linear story " love and "wedding," waiting, betrayal and death " are r…
From the beginning, one core component of Rosenbaum's mission has been the cultivation of a contemporary American repertoire and the regular commission of new works. Rosenbaum is, in fact, a…
But the concert didn't have the satisfaction of a big blockbuster " such as Haydn's Creation, with which the season began " or of two or three masterworks. Music of the Anglican tradition is…
"Elliott loves bebop" is a much more satisfying piece than either "Sonerna" or "No slash" on their own. It would be no matter what. But the experience of having listened to the two quartets …
Thanking his packed audience at Le Poisson Rouge for coming to hear him play, Alam Khan described his music on this evening as a tribute to his father, Ali Akbar Khan, whose ninety-fifth bir…
"Vespers of 1610" is a big and oddly sprawling work. It makes no liturgical sense, and, in terms of texts, has little programmatic unity beyond a consistent Marian devotion. But it is a cohe…
Over the course of Salif Keita's recent appearance at The Town Hall there was a story whose shape reflected both Keita's identity and his music. At 7:00 p.m., there was a question-and-answer…
Beginning in the 1980s, Glass and Suso collaborated on several projects. Genet's difficult, demanding, essentially un-actable and relentlessly fracturing play, "The Screens," elicited from G…
Neither a "Western composer" nor a "Japanese composer," Mochizuki hasn't sought to manufacture some sort of mix-and-match blend. She doesn't borrow or build add-ons. Instead, seeking inspira…
This is serious work. Without defiance of traditional or conservative contemporary classical music simply for mere defiance's haughty sake, Furrer is developing his own particular vocabulary…
The second work of the evening was the world premiere of Ivan Moody's Vespers Sequence. In careful, clear program notes, Moody described his goals in his compositions in general and in this …
