Is there any career that gives better birthday celebrations than being a composer? Pauline Oliveros turns 80 later this month and RPI, where she teaches, pulled out all the stops on Thursday night (5/10/12) at EMPAC in Troy. There was music and speeches, cake and champagne, plus party favors (a newly issued DVD). The vaunted acoustics of the EMPAC concert hall were even spiffed up for the occasion. A computer-aided loudspeaker system, designed by Jonas Braasch and a team of students, recreated the sound of a two million gallon cistern in Washington State where Oliveros made a landmark recording...

Robert Wood, founder of UrbanArias opera company, believes that new opera presented in smaller venues using nominal forces at reasonable ticket prices can be successful. Last weekend (4/14/12) he was proved right, with a solid premiere of “Positions 1956,” commissioned by the DC-based group from composer Conrad Cummings and librettist Michael Korie. “Positions 1956” uses various 1950’s instructional manuals, all dealing with “positions”  (sexual, physical exercise, partner-dancing) as source material for a three-part 90-minute musical theater work that follows a year in the life...

As part of its 29th appearance in the Union College Concert Series in Schenectady on Sunday afternoon (4/1/12), the Emerson String Quartet brought a recent work by the acclaimed British composer Thomas Ades. “The Four Quarters” was written in 2010 for the Emerson and commissioned by Carnegie Hall, during Ades’ tenure as its composer in residence. Get used to Ades’ name, if you don’t already know it.  Next fall, he’ll conduct eight performances of his opera “The Tempest” at The Metropolitan Opera, all part of a typically busy season for Ades.  Besides composing and conducting he’s...

A death watch is the simplest way to describe the months leading up to New York City Opera’s curtailed and displaced 2012 winter season.  The company’s financial crisis caused it to abandon the David H. Koch Theater (formerly the New York State Theater), it’s long-time home at Lincoln Center, and to be at such loggerheads with the musicians union that the season itself was in jeopardy. But a new production of “La Traviata” did go on as scheduled at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, followed by four performances of “Prima Donna,” the 2009 opera by Rufus Wainwright, the popular Canadian-American...

Jeremy Denk, piano Union College Memorial Chapel, Schenectady December 2, 2011 Sometimes there’s just too darned much talking at classical concerts. Whether it’s welcoming the crowd, thanking the donors and pleading for more contributions, or explicating what’s about to happen in the music, all that verbiage gets tiresome. Yet along comes a musician like Jeremy Denk who’s almost as good with words as he is at playing the piano.  Denk made his third appearance at the Union College Concert Series on Friday night and offered rather extensive remarks throughout the night.  Though he’s...

“Great Music, Right Here” is the apt motto of the Glens Falls Symphony.  Since the orchestra and its music director Charles Peltz regularly venture into contemporary music, “Right Now” might be an appropriate tag. Sunday afternoon’s program featured something far better than a risky premiere.  Instead, it was Jennifer Higdon’s Violin Concerto, which was written in 2009 and received the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Music.  That award doesn’t always mean enduring quality but Higdon’s concerto has got the stuff. One of today’s most widely performed composers, Higdon writes in the current...

It’s amazing how Leon Botstein and Bard College’s SummerScape series keep coming up with “overlooked masterpieces” from the operatic repertoire.  At least that’s what the scholarly support materials tell us they are. The reality of what’s heard and seen on stage is often another matter. This year’s entry is “Die Liebe der Danae.” Richard Strauss’ second to last opera, it was completed in 1940 but only premiered in 1952, three years after the composer’s death.  The piece’s New York staged debut opened on Friday night and was seen on Sunday afternoon at the Fisher Center. Besides...

“We’ve only just begun” or some other ‘70s hit from The Carpenters was about as daring or off the beaten path as “Voigt Lessons” was expected to get.  After all, how much more could The Glimmerglass Festival and its new boss Francesca Zambello really expect from the great diva Deborah Voigt?  She was already starring in “Annie Get Your Gun” and doing it on the back roads of upstate New York for two long summer months. Throwing in one afternoon recital was going to be a nice added touch.  But renditions of some standards and maybe a few arias would have sufficed, right?  If she...

It was good to actually hear the Philadelphia Orchestra, rather than hear about the Philadelphia Orchestra. When it filed for bankruptcy earlier this year, the venerable institution became a sad symbol for the fragile state of the economy and the arts in general. Only the near demise of the New York City Opera — once an annual visitor to Saratoga — has been bigger news. Meanwhile the orchestra keeps playing and awaits its young music director Yannick Nezet-Seguin, whose tenure is still more than a year from starting. It’s a period of transition for the annual summer residency at...

CARMEN Glimmerglass Festival Opening Night, 7/2/11 In the new production of “Carmen,” which opened at the Glimmerglass Festival on Saturday, the action grows more tight and focused throughout the night until Carmen and Don Jose are alone in a ring.  In a daring moment of surrender, Carmen stops her tormenting ways and prostrates herself before her angry and jilted lover.  She seems to think better of it, but it’s too late. The knife plunges. The lights are at their brightest in that climax.  The evening began in a washed out haze with only fleeting bits of color against a jumbled set of...