“If you’re doing a program about sex, you can hardly avoid a piece by me,” says David Del Tredici.  The American Modern Ensemble certainly didn’t take a pass in putting together their “XXX” concert on Sunday (5/1) at the Galapagos Art Space in Brooklyn.  Along with Del Tredici, the program also features music of Jacob Druckman, Robert Paterson, John Cage and Glenn Crytzer. Del Tredici will be represented with “Wondrous the Merge,” a 20-minute piece for string quartet and baritone.  Because of the text, by the late gay poet James Broughton, the 2003 premiere almost didn’t...

American soprano Patricia Racette was honored at the sixth annual Opera News Awards, sponsored by the magazine, which is affiliated with the Metropolitan Opera. The event took place on April 17 at the Plaza Hotel.  Other honorees were tenor Jonas Kaufmann, conductor Riccardo Muti, soprano Kiri Te Kanawa and bass-baritone Bryn Terfel. In an essay giving lauds to Racette, writer Oussama Zahr touches on Racette being out in just the second paragraph. He goes back to a 2002 Opera News interview when she said, “You know, this career is so all-encompassing that to try and disengage such a huge...

Eighty-eight keys just aren’t enough for Jaroslaw Kapuscinski. He knows his way around the black and white notes of a tradition piano keyboard plenty well, having studied at the Chopin Academy in his native Warsaw. But for the last 20 years he’s created and performed original works that combined the piano with video. Kapuscinski will appear at EMPAC on Saturday night (4/16) in a program titled “Catch the Tiger.” “I perform audio-visually and create narratives that connect different media. I’m an inter-media composer,” explains Kapuscinski. “I like the term inter-media rather than...

The melody had to come first.  Until he had it, composer John Corigliano waited — about 12 years — before accepting percussionist Evelyn Glennie’s commission for a new concerto. Corigliano admits that he’s a slow writer and that coming up with a fresh new tune isn’t easy.  But it didn’t really take him that all that time to string the notes together. The real challenge was whether or not a lyric, sustained line could be achieved from the vast battery of percussion instruments that better are at exploding than at singing.  Eventually the composer did find his magical answer...

Canadian composer Rodney Sharman has three new works debuting this month… First up is the world premiere of his new Violin Concerto on March 6 and 7 with soloist Jonathan Crow and the Victoria Symphony, conducted by music director Tania Miller.  Then on March 26 and 27, the same orchestra with guest conductor Alain Trudel premieres “Romantic Ideals.”  The pieces are the culmination of Sharman’s three-year residency with the orchestra.  Yet another premiere, “Song without Words” for English horn and orchestra, took place last season. Sharman’s third...

Nicholas Chase will be in good company this week at the Other Mind Festival in San Francisco.  He’s a composer fellow hobnobbing with Louis Andriessen and other more senior composers, all on hand for the week-long series of events, now in its 16th season. Nick is a Ph.D. candidate in the iEar program at Rensselaer Polytechnical Institute in Troy, NY. Though he’s been in the Capital Region for at least a couple of years now, he considers himself bi-coastal, with bases of operation also in the Bay Area and Seattle. A new project in California is the UFOrchestra – Unidentified Future...

On the Fox show “Glee,” the teenagers Kurt (Chris Colfer) and Blaine (Darren Criss) are an adorable young couple who aren’t drenched in shame, being beat up or suffering from a disease. Best of all, they sing to each other. Besides the positive nature of their portrayal, a touching part of this pair is that they’re members of the high school glee club.  Choirs – at school and church – were for me a safe haven from bullying as well as a place to begin to learn how to express myself and explore my artistic side. If only I could have flirted with the other choir buys...

In December the Manhattan School of Music gave three staged performances of Lee Hoiby’s “Summer & Smoke,” a 1971 adaptation of a Tennessee Williams piece with a libretto by Lanford Wilson. Anthony Tommasini in the Times gave a very positive review, especially of the work referring to the “sure dramatic pacing and understated expressivity, in music admirable for its directness and melodic grace” (When Youthful Desire Grows Into Regret).  Not surprisingly, James Jordon (Parterre Box) was harsher in his review for the New York Post saying the original Williams material...

For singer/songwriter Rufus Wainwright’s return to The Egg in Albany tonight, every audience member gets a close up view.  That’s thanks to the visual component of the concert’s first half, a video creation by Douglas Gordon. But don’t expect a live action shot of Wainwright on a big screen, like at an arena rock show. Gordon is an acclaimed artist who works in large scale video formats and he’s created a very long and slow-moving treatment of Wainwright’s eyes, which are lined in heavy black mascara. The video will play on a 30-foot screen for the entire first half of the concert...

It’s not just stars of popular culture who are the subject of “worship sites.”  An on-line tribute to the late American composer and pianist Robert Helps (1928-2001) is nothing less than pious veneration.  While including the required list of compositions plus a timeline and discography, the site is an interactive, dynamic progression – obviously the work of loving care.  It was conceived by Andrea Infamosa and designed by Manuel Coita, who seem to be from France. The appreciation of Bob Helps, apparently, is universal. The Helps Web Monument also includes loads of pictures...